How to Read Your PSEG-LI Bill Before Going Solar

Before a solar installer pulls out a shading tool or quotes panel brands, they need one document from you: your PSEG Long Island electric bill — ideally 12 months of it. Everything else, from system size in kilowatts to projected annual savings to whether battery storage pencils out, gets calculated from your actual usage data.

PSEG-LI bills have a reputation for being hard to read. The format splits charges across supply and delivery, layers in taxes and surcharges, and buries the usage history on the back. Here’s how to find the numbers that matter.

The three numbers a solar installer pulls from your bill

Your 12-month total kWh consumption

On the back of your PSEG-LI paper bill — or in the “Usage History” tab at pseg.com — there’s a bar chart showing monthly kilowatt-hours for the past 12 to 24 months. Add those 12 bars together.

For a typical 1,800 sq. ft. north shore Long Island home with central AC, the annual total runs 9,000–13,000 kWh. A well-insulated 2,400 sq. ft. home with gas heat might be 7,500 kWh. A smaller house with electric baseboard heat can hit 18,000 kWh or more.

A rough sizing rule for Long Island: divide your annual kWh by 1,150 to get a ballpark kilowatt-DC array size. A 10,000 kWh/year home needs roughly an 8.7 kW system, based on our local average of 4.3 peak sun hours per day. Our residential solar installation page walks through how we apply this math using your specific roof and usage.

Your blended cost per kWh

Take your total bill for any month (supply plus delivery combined, before credits) and divide by the kWh consumed that month. On current PSEG-LI SC1 residential rates, this blended number runs $0.27–$0.34/kWh all-in depending on season. That figure is the rate your panels offset — and a key reason Long Island is one of the stronger solar markets in the northeast despite the latitude.

Your peak monthly usage

Find your highest-usage month — almost always July or August due to central air conditioning. If your peak month hits 1,800 kWh while your average month is 800 kWh, that 2.25x swing tells an installer whether to size for average consumption or for peak, and whether battery storage makes sense to shave demand charges and cover overnight hours without grid draw.

Reading the supply charges section

Supply charges cover the electricity commodity — the electrons themselves, from PSEG-LI directly or from an alternate supplier (ESCO) you’ve contracted with.

Commodity charge: The per-kWh rate you pay for electricity. PSEG-LI’s default SC1 commodity rate floats quarterly — the current rate appears on pseg.com or on the rate schedule line at the top of your bill. As of mid-2026, the commodity portion sits at approximately $0.11–$0.13/kWh. This is before transmission or delivery.

Transmission charge: A per-kWh fee for the high-voltage grid infrastructure from generating plants to local distribution substations. It typically runs $0.02–$0.04/kWh and often appears bundled with the commodity line in the summary rather than as a separate item.

ESCO consideration: If you switched your supply to an alternate provider, your commodity charge will show a different name and potentially a different rate. Net metering credits are always calculated at the default PSEG-LI commodity rate — not your ESCO rate. If your ESCO rate differs from PSEG-LI’s default, note your contract end date before signing a solar contract.

Reading the delivery charges section

Delivery covers the local poles, wires, transformers, and metering equipment that gets power from the substation to your meter. Solar dramatically reduces these charges but does not eliminate them.

Distribution charge: A per-kWh rate applied to your net grid draw — electricity you actually pull from the grid after subtracting solar production. After solar, net draw drops sharply, so this charge drops in proportion. It reaches zero only if you add enough battery capacity to cover all overnight demand without any grid draw.

Fixed customer charge: PSEG-LI charges SC1 residential customers $11.85/month regardless of usage. This line is in the delivery section and is one of the few charges solar cannot offset. It’s the floor of your monthly PSEG-LI bill after solar. Most Long Island solar homeowners pay $15–$30/month after going solar, down from a pre-solar average of $200–$350/month.

Taxes, surcharges, and riders: Below the main delivery lines you’ll find: Merchant Function Charge, Revenue Decoupling Mechanism, NY State and local sales tax, and various PSEG-LI riders tied to infrastructure programs. These are percentage-based additions, so as your supply and delivery charges fall after solar, these ancillary charges fall proportionally too.

How net metering changes your bill

Under PSEG Long Island’s net metering program, excess solar power exported to the grid earns a credit at the full retail supply rate — roughly $0.27–$0.31/kWh at today’s rates. That credit shows up as a negative “Net Metering Credit” line in the supply charges section.

Credits carry forward month to month within a 12-month billing cycle. During summer, panels typically produce more than you consume, banking credits. In winter, production drops and you draw down that accumulated balance. This seasonal swing is why solar works well on Long Island even with cold winters — the summer surplus offsets the winter deficit.

PSEG-LI performs an annual true-up (typically April): any remaining credit is paid out at the avoided-cost rate, approximately $0.08–$0.10/kWh — roughly one-third of the retail rate earned during the year. This is why sizing matters. An array producing 120% of your annual usage will push a meaningful fraction of its output into the low-rate true-up, lowering your return on investment. Our install process covers how we calculate the right system size to stay close to 100% offset.

For the 30% federal Investment Tax Credit, NYSERDA NY-Sun rebate, and NY State 25% tax credit that all stack on top of net metering savings, see our full incentives breakdown.

Pulling your 12-month history from MyPSEG

You don’t need a full year of paper bills. Log into pseg.com or the MyPSEG app and look for:

• Usage History — a 24-month bar chart of monthly kWh, with a CSV export option
• Bill History — downloadable PDFs going back several years
• Green Button Data — 15-minute-interval usage in a machine-readable format; many installers use design software (Aurora Solar, Solargraf, EagleView) that ingests it directly

For our sizing conversations, we ask for either a Green Button download or two representative bills: your highest summer month and a typical spring month. Real Long Island install case studies show how those actual usage numbers translate into a specific array size, payback timeline, and monthly savings figure.

Common bill items to flag for your installer

Two line items get missed often enough that they’re worth calling out before the design conversation:

Time-of-Use enrollment. If you’ve opted into PSEG-LI’s TOU (SC1-VS) rate, your supply charge varies by hour of day — peak summer afternoon hours run roughly $0.34/kWh while overnight winter hours run closer to $0.10/kWh. TOU changes the net metering math because credits are valued at the rate when they were exported, not the rate when they’re consumed. If you’re on TOU, mention it on the first call. Most Long Island residential homeowners are on flat-rate SC1, where this complication doesn’t apply.

Outstanding balances and budget billing. If you’re enrolled in Budget Billing (a smoothed monthly average rather than actual usage), the “balance” line on your bill reflects an averaging position, not real consumption. We size from actual kWh, not from budget-billed monthly dollars, so the 12-month kWh totals are what matter. Your peak summer month under Budget Billing might show as $280 while the actual underlying consumption was 1,900 kWh — those numbers diverge enough to matter for sizing accuracy.