HomeLet’s start with the conclusion, because a lot of material on this subject avoids it: in Con Edison territory, a home battery is worth buying if you want protection from outages. It is generally not worth buying to reduce your electricity bill.
Anyone selling you a battery in New York City primarily on bill savings is either confused or not being straight with you. Here is why.
Net metering already does what a battery does
A battery’s bill-saving proposition, in most of the country, is arbitrage. Store surplus solar production when it is cheap or unwanted, use it later when power is expensive. That works where the utility pays you much less for exported energy than it charges you for imported energy — the gap is what the battery captures.
Con Edison does not have that gap for residential solar. Residential systems interconnecting now receive one-to-one credit at the full retail rate for exported energy, with credits rolling forward month to month, locked for twenty years.
Think about what that means. The grid is already storing your surplus at full retail value, indefinitely, at no cost to you, with no round-trip losses and no equipment to maintain. It is a better battery than a battery.
So the incremental bill saving from adding storage is small. You are paying a substantial sum to duplicate a service you already receive for free.
This is a good news story about New York, not a knock on batteries. In a state that had gutted net metering, the calculation would be completely different. Ours has not.
What a battery genuinely buys
It keeps the lights on when the grid goes down. That is the product. Whether it is worth the money depends entirely on how much outages cost and bother you.
Some considerations that should actually drive the decision:
- How often do you lose power, and for how long? This varies enormously across the city. Dense areas with underground distribution — much of Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn — rarely see long residential outages. Areas with overhead lines and heavy tree canopy — Riverdale, eastern Queens, parts of Staten Island — see storm outages that can run days.
- What does an outage actually cost you? A freezer of food and a dark evening is an inconvenience. Medical equipment, a home office you cannot work without, a sump pump in a flood-prone basement, or a tenant you are responsible for is a different calculation entirely.
- Do you have a basement that floods? Sump pump backup during exactly the storm that cuts your power is one of the clearest legitimate cases for storage in this city.
If you have sat through multi-day outages and hated it, price a battery. If you cannot remember your last outage, the money is better spent on more panels.
Solar without a battery does not power your house in an outage
This surprises almost everyone and is worth stating plainly.
A grid-tied solar array shuts down when the grid goes down. This is deliberate and required — it protects utility crews working on de-energised lines from having your panels back-feeding them. So on a sunny afternoon during a blackout, an array without storage produces nothing for you.
If keeping the lights on during outages is your reason for going solar, you need storage, or you have not bought what you thought you bought. This is the single most common misunderstanding about residential solar, and it is worth confirming explicitly with any installer.
The FDNY rules, which are the real constraint here
New York City regulates lithium battery installations more tightly than almost anywhere in the country, and for understandable reasons given the building stock and the fire department’s experience with lithium batteries generally.
Without pretending to summarise a code, the practical shape of it:
- Siting is restricted. Where a battery can go — outdoors, in a garage, on which wall, how far from windows, doors and egress paths — is governed rather than a matter of convenience. Below-grade locations, including basements, are prohibited unless specifically approved — which rules out the spot most homeowners assume a battery goes.
- Total capacity is limited per dwelling, and stepping above thresholds triggers additional requirements.
- Equipment must be listed and approved. The specific product matters, not just the category, and FDNY approval is its own process.
- It is a separate permitting track from your solar filing, with its own review and inspection.
What this means for you: a battery in New York City is a longer, more constrained project than in the suburbs, and the answer to “can I put it there” is frequently no. Any installer proposing storage should tell you where it can legally go in your building before you are quoted, because on some properties the honest answer is nowhere convenient.
Do not let anyone install storage without the proper permitting. Beyond the obvious safety issue, an unpermitted battery is a problem at your next insurance renewal and at sale.
Sizing, briefly
Backup sizing is not about your whole house. It is about a chosen set of critical circuits — refrigerator, some lighting, internet, a sump pump, medical equipment, phone charging — running for a defined period.
Trying to back up central air conditioning or electric resistance heat pushes you into capacity that is expensive and, in New York City, often not permittable anyway. The sensible design picks a critical-loads panel and sizes storage against that, which is both cheaper and far more likely to be approvable.
Note also that during an extended outage a solar array can recharge the battery each day, which turns a one-night backup into something that can run much longer. That combination — modest battery, working array — is more useful in a multi-day storm outage than a large battery alone.
The incentives question
Storage incentives in New York have existed in various forms and change with program cycles, so the only sound advice is to ask what is currently available for residential storage in Con Edison territory rather than relying on anything written a year ago.
One correction that does apply: the 30% federal residential credit, which used to cover qualifying storage, was repealed for property placed in service after December 31, 2025. If you were planning a battery around that credit, it is gone.
So: should you?
A straight recommendation. If you have lost power for more than a day in the last few years and it genuinely disrupted your household, storage is worth pricing — as insurance, evaluated the way you evaluate insurance rather than by payback period. If outages are a rare annoyance, put the money into panels, where every dollar reliably reduces a bill.
And if anyone shows you a battery proposal with a payback period in Con Edison territory, ask them to explain where the savings come from given one-to-one net metering. It is a fair question, and the answer will tell you a lot about who you are dealing with.
If you want an honest read on whether storage makes sense at your address — including whether it can legally be sited there at all — we will tell you, including when the answer is no.
Update: New York City adopted new energy storage rules effective 26 October 2025 that change where a battery can be installed – notably prohibiting below-grade locations. See solar battery storage in NYC for the current requirements.