How the Netting tariff works
Under Netting your solar serves your home first. Electricity your household uses as it is generated simply displaces electricity you would have bought, and excess generation exported to the grid earns bill credits at the retail rate.
That is the closer analogue to the retail net metering Connecticut closed to new residential customers at the end of 2021, which is why it is the more intuitive of the two options for most homeowners.
The complication for 2026 enrollees is the Solar Energy Adjustment, a non-bypassable charge PURA set at $0.0402 per kWh, against $0.005 for earlier enrollees. It is levied on total generation rather than only on exports, so it applies to the electricity you consume yourself as well.
Netting rewards self-consumption, since a kilowatt hour used at home avoids the full retail price. That makes household timing, and storage, more relevant under Netting than under the alternative.
How the Buy-All tariff works
Under Buy-All the utility purchases the entire output of your system at a fixed tariff rate, and you separately buy all the electricity your household uses at the ordinary retail rate. The two flows are accounted for independently.
Nothing about your household consumption pattern affects what the system earns, because every kilowatt hour it produces is sold at the same rate whether you happen to be home or not.
That is the trade: predictability instead of upside. A Buy-All contract locks a known rate for 20 years, which insulates you from tariff changes but also means you do not benefit if retail electricity prices rise sharply over the term.
It also changes what a battery is for. Under Buy-All a battery does not increase what the system earns, since output is sold regardless, so the case for storage becomes about outage resilience rather than about economics.
How to actually choose
The honest answer is that this needs your own numbers rather than a rule of thumb, which is precisely why it deserves more than the few minutes it usually gets. Ask your installer for both projections, built on the same system and the same production estimate, side by side.
The variables that move the answer are your self-consumption share, your view on where retail electricity prices go over twenty years, and whether you want a battery for reasons other than economics.
A household that is out all day and uses most of its power in the evening self-consumes less, which weakens one of the arguments for Netting unless storage is in the design.
Ask what happens if you move. A 20-year tariff attached to a property is a factor in a future sale, and understanding how the contract transfers is part of understanding what you are signing.
Costing it out with the adjustment applied
The 30 percent federal Residential Clean Energy Credit under Section 25D expired for property placed in service after December 31, 2025, so a cash or loan purchase in New Haven receives no federal tax credit. Section 48E survives at 30 percent for third-party owners under leases and power purchase agreements.
What exists is the 20-year RRES contract on one of the two tariffs described above, with the Solar Energy Adjustment of $0.0402 per kWh applying to 2026 Netting enrollees on total generation.
Households at or below 60 percent of State Median Income receive an income-eligible adder, effective January 1, 2026, of $0.035 per net kWh on Netting or $0.055 per kWh on Buy-All. It is not applied automatically, so ask.
Add the sales and use tax exemption under CGS Section 12-412, the property tax exemption under CGS Section 12-81, and the electricity you stop buying at roughly 27.4 cents per kWh. Ask for both tariff projections in writing before you choose.