Economics of Solar
How solar actually pays in Alberta, winters and all
Why I built this page
I have this same conversation at almost every kitchen table. Somebody has done an hour of reading, watched a video, and had a salesperson talk at them. They know solar is a thing. Nobody has ever shown them how the money actually moves.
One customer came to me after another company quoted her a number that was thousands high. She was not looking for panels anymore. She was looking for somebody who would explain it straight. So I stopped selling and started explaining, and she bought a system that afternoon, because once you can see the numbers it sells itself.
Everything I would say at your table is on this page. Play with it. Nothing here is written to talk you into anything, and if you walk away knowing enough to argue with me, I have done my job. My name is Dmitry Naboka. I am a Master Electrician, licence #13824, 14 years in the trade, and I have run solar on my own roof since 2022.
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1. The basics
Sunlight to socket, in five moves
No moving parts, no fuel, nothing to fill up. Tap each step. It really is this short.
That is the whole machine. Five steps, no fuel, and the only maintenance conversation I ever have with customers is about snow and about keeping the monitoring app on their phone.
2. The part that makes it click
You are chopping firewood, except it is sunshine
Here is how I explain Alberta solar to everybody, and once it lands nobody asks about winter again. In the old days you spent the good weather cutting and stacking wood. You were not burning it in July. You were putting it up for January, and in January you sat inside and burned the pile. Solar is that, with sunshine, and the woodpile is digital.
What the roof makes, month by month
Your woodpile, in credits
Shortest days of the year and snow on the glass. Nothing much happens. You are living off the credits you banked last summer.
Half a percent a year is the median of nearly 2,000 measured module degradation rates in NREL, Photovoltaic Degradation Rates, An Analytical Review, read 26 August 2026. Crystalline silicon median 0.5 percent per year, average 0.7. Monthly production is the same modelled Edmonton profile used on our Edmonton solar page, for a roughly 9.5 kW roof with snow cover counted, based on the NRCan figure of about 1,200 kWh per kW per year for this city. It is a model, not your meter. The real numbers off my own 9.56 kW roof: best month 1,358 kWh in July 2026, worst month 3 kWh in December 2025 when the snow never came off the glass, and 31,581 kWh total over 47 months since September 2022. My June 2026 bill was -$109.98 and July 2026 was -$114.10.
What people fear about winter
- Short days and snow mean December production is close to nothing. That part is true.
- They assume that kills the whole idea.
- They picture paying full price all winter with panels sitting there useless.
What actually happens
- The system is measured over a year, not a month. Summer overproduction is the point.
- Those summer credits sit on your account and pay the winter bills.
- When the pile does run out you buy power back at the low winter rate, not the high one.
Size a system to my billTwo numbers off your own bill and the tool further down does the rest. Nothing to fill in, nobody calls you.
3. The big one
The Micro-generation Regulation, and why it is most of the work
Bolting panels to a roof is the easy part. Any crew can do that in two days. Here is what you are really paying for, and almost nobody explains it: you are applying to become an approved electricity generator on EPCOR's or FortisAlberta's lines. Once you are through, you are allowed to push power onto a public grid and be paid for it. That is a different legal animal than a customer, and it is why there is paperwork, an engineer's stamp and two permits.
Alberta's Micro-generation Regulation is the door. Everything my crew does, every form I file, every inspection I book, exists to get you through it cleanly. Tap each gate.
1Prove the size is justified
The regulation says a micro-generation unit is meant to meet all or a portion of your total annual energy consumption for your existing annual needs. In plain words, the system is sized to your power bill and your bill is the ceiling. This is gate one because everything after it depends on the number being defensible.
Signed off by: your wire owner2An engineer stamps the design
An APEGA licensed engineer reviews and stamps the electrical design. On my quotes that line is $450 and it is not optional, it is not padding, and a quote that does not have it in there somewhere is either hiding it or skipping it.
Signed off by: a professional engineer3Two separate permits
A City of Edmonton electrical permit, about $220, and an Alberta Safety Codes permit, about $180. Different bodies, different purposes. I pull both under my own Master Electrician licence, #13824, which means my licence is what is on the line at inspection, not a subcontractor's.
Signed off by: the city and the province4The micro-generation application
This is the actual application to generate. It goes to your distribution facility owner, which around here is EPCOR or FortisAlberta depending on which side of the line you live on. They evaluate it, they set the requirements, and they decide what your site is allowed to do. I file it. You do not chase it.
Signed off by: EPCOR or FortisAlberta5Inspection, then the meter swap
An inspector comes out. When it passes, the utility swaps your meter for a bidirectional one that can count power in both directions, and your site gets flagged as a micro-generator in the provincial site catalogue. That flag is what makes the credits real. Until it is set, you are just a house with panels.
Signed off by: inspector, then the utilitySizing rule, the evidence list in the next section, and who evaluates the application: Alberta Utilities Commission, Micro-generation frequently asked questions, read 26 August 2026. The AUC states a micro-generation generating unit is intended to meet all or a portion of the customer's total annual energy consumption for their existing annual energy needs, and that distribution facility owners evaluate the application and determine requirements. Permit and engineering figures are our own quoted line items, itemised on the true cost worksheet.
4. Sizing
Your power bill is the ceiling, and your roof is the other one
This is where I disappoint people, so I would rather do it here than at your table. You do not get to buy as much solar as you want. You get to buy as much as you can prove you use. Want a bigger system? Show me a bigger bill, or show me proof the bill is about to grow.
100% of what you use
The line at 100% is the one that matters. We aim to get as close under it as your roof will allow.
Want more than your bill justifies? There is a legitimate door.
If your consumption is about to go up, the regulator will look at it, case by case, as long as you can prove it. These are the kinds of evidence the AUC names, and I have used most of them:
Proof that counts
- Proof of purchase or registration for an electric vehicle
- An approved development permit for an addition, a shop or a garage
- Proof of purchase or installation for new equipment, a hot tub or a heat pump
- Engineered drawings for work that is going ahead
What will not fly
- Someday we might get an EV
- A system sized to fill the roof because the roof was there
- Sizing to 130% of your use and hoping nobody reads the application
- A salesperson telling you to overstate future load
Two honest notes. Future plans get reviewed one at a time, so nobody can promise you an outcome in advance, including me. And if you want to add generation later, that is a fresh micro-generation application, not a phone call. Worth knowing before somebody tells you to start small and bolt more on next spring.
Sized near 100%
- Matches the regulation as written, so the application is straightforward
- Nearly every kWh you make either runs your house or banks as credit at the rate you are on
- No awkward conversation with the wire owner halfway through your build
Sized well over 100%
- Generating for revenue instead of your own use puts you in a different category entirely
- The application can come back with conditions, or come back for rework
- You paid for panels you were never going to be credited for at the good rate
See my paybackThe full calculator, with your own bill, your own roof and the sun numbers for this city already in it.
5. The one real design choice
Two ways to wire an array, and how to pick
When you talk to me, or to anybody else, this is the decision that actually changes your quote. I would rather you walk in already knowing which one you want and why. Answer three questions.
Does anything shade your roof, at any time of day?
How many directions would panels face?
Do you want to see each panel on your phone?
Microinverters, one per panel
- Every panel works independently, so shade on one does not drag the others down
- Panel by panel monitoring, which makes a service call fast years from now
- No single box that stops the whole array when it fails
- Costs more, and there is electronics under every module
- Handles multiple roof faces without a redesign
String inverter, one box for the array
- Cheaper, simpler, one unit to service instead of twenty
- Great on a single clear roof face with no shade
- The string performs like a team, so the weakest panel sets the pace
- If it quits, the whole array is down until it is swapped
- DC optimizers can be added to just the shaded panels as a middle path
There is no villain here. Both are proven and I install both. What I will not do is quote you the cheaper design on a shaded roof and let you find out in year three.
6. Price
Every quote comes down to dollars per watt
Forget the total for a second. Solar has one honest yardstick: take the price, divide by the watts, and you can compare any two quotes in the province in about four seconds. A 10 kW system is 10,000 watts. Put your quote in and see where it lands.
$2.75 per watt
Our own posted anchors, so you can check my math: 5 kW runs $14,000 to $18,000, a 7 to 8 kW system runs $20,000 to $22,000, and 10 kW runs $25,000 to $31,000. Full line by line breakdown on the true cost worksheet.
7. Bidirectional metering
The meter counts both ways, and that changes everything
Once you are approved, the utility swaps your meter for one that counts power leaving as well as arriving. Drag through a summer day and watch where your power is actually going.
12 midnight
The roof is asleep. Everything the house uses right now comes off the grid.
The day shape here is illustrative for a roughly 9.5 kW roof against a normal household load, so you can see the relationship. Your own numbers come off your bill and your walkdown, not off this dial.
Charged and credited at the same rate. The money is in the switch.
Here is the part almost everybody gets wrong, including salespeople who mean well. Under the Micro-generation Regulation a small micro-generator has to be charged and credited at the same rate. So there is no clever afternoon where you are selling at 35 cents and buying at 6 cents at the same time. What there is, is two rates and permission to move between them.
Same kilowatt hour, two prices, and you get to say which one you are sitting on. Bank the bright months at the high rate, buy the dark months back at the low one. That is the actual mechanism behind my own June and July statements coming back as credits of $109.98 and $114.10 instead of bills. It is not an export bonus and it is not arbitrage. It is being on the right side of a switch at the right time of year, which is why section 13 of this page exists.
Rates and rules from Solar Club and their July 2026 fact sheet, read 26 August 2026. The fact sheet states it plainly: “Per the Alberta Micro-Generation Regulation, small micro-generators (where the system capacity is less than 150 kW) must be charged and credited at the same rate. In other words, when you are on the HI Rate (at 35.0 ¢/kWh), you are charged for energy you import at 35.0 ¢/kWh and credited for energy you export back to the grid at 35.0 ¢/kWh.” It also states that you can “Switch to the HI Rate at any time” and that “Once your site is registered as a micro-generator, it will automatically be switched to the LO Rate.” The fact sheet does not publish fixed calendar months for either rate, so I am not going to put months on it for them.
Two things you should know about who is telling you this
- I get paid if you sign up. I am on this rate structure myself through Rewards Power, they are my referral partner, and you are hearing about them from somebody with a reason to mention them. Weigh it accordingly.
- These are not Raydn prices and they will change. Retail rates move. Get the number confirmed in writing by the retailer before you count on it, and if it does not match what you read here, the retailer is right and this page is out of date.
8. Self-consumption
The kilowatt hour you never sell is the best one you make
There is a word for power that goes straight from your roof into your own house without ever touching the utility's wires. It is called self-consumption, and it is the only kilowatt hour on your property that nobody gets to charge you a delivery fee on. Once you understand why, the rest of your bill stops being a mystery.
Used in the house
- Made on your roof, consumed in your kitchen, in about the time it takes to read this line.
- Offsets a kilowatt hour you would otherwise have bought at whatever rate you are on.
- Carries no delivery and no transmission charge, because it never went out to the street and came back.
- This is the one you want more of, and it costs nothing to get more of it.
Sent out as credit
- Real money, credited at the rate you are on, which is the same rate you are charged.
- Banks against the months when the roof makes almost nothing.
- Perfectly fine. It is just not free, because when you buy it back the wires get their cut.
Bought back later
- Charged at the rate you are on, and that is the part solar can zero out.
- Then delivery, transmission and the fixed site and meter charges go on top, and those are for the wires, not the energy.
- That is why nobody honest promises you a $0 bill.
Do not take my word for the size of it. Take your own bill. Find the line that is energy and the total at the bottom, put both in here, and see how much of what you pay every month has nothing to do with kilowatt hours at all.
Energy share of your bill
Now the useful part. Raising your self-consumption is free, it takes about ten minutes of setting timers, and it is the only lever on this page that costs nothing at all. Tap any of them.
1Run the big loads while the sun is up
Dishwasher, washer, dryer. If you are running them at eleven at night out of habit, you are buying that power off the grid while your own roof sat there exporting at noon. Most machines made in the last decade have a delay start button on them. Set it once and forget about it.
Costs nothing2Put the EV on a midday timer
This is the biggest single one, and it is why section 10 of this page is about the car. An EV is the largest controllable load in most houses. Charging it off the roof between roughly ten and three, on the days the car is home, converts a large chunk of your export straight into self-consumption. Every car and every charger I install can schedule this from the app.
Costs nothing once the charger is in3Let the hot water tank reheat in the afternoon
If your hot water is electric, the tank is a battery you already own. It stores heat, not electrons, and it does not care what time of day it got heated. A timer or a smart breaker moves that reheat into the middle of the day. If your hot water is gas, skip this one, it does nothing for you.
Costs a timer, or a smart breaker4Move pool, hot tub and filter cycles to midday
Filter pumps and heaters run on a schedule that somebody set at installation and nobody has looked at since. They are usually running overnight. Moving them into the solar window is a five minute job on the control panel and it is one of the cleanest wins there is, because the load is large and it genuinely does not matter when it happens.
Costs nothing5Let the house coast overnight
In summer, pre-cool a couple of degrees in the afternoon while the roof is producing and let the house drift back up in the evening. In shoulder season, do the same in reverse with the heat. You are using the building itself as thermal storage. Any programmable thermostat does this and most people have one already and have never touched the schedule.
Costs nothingOne honest limit, because I would rather say it than have you find it. None of this is a rate trick, and none of it changes what you are paid for export. What it does is stop a kilowatt hour from making a round trip through the utility's wires, and it is that round trip that gets charged delivery and transmission. Those are tariff charges set by your wire owner, not by me and not by your retailer, so go look at the delivery line on your own bill for the real size of the prize at your address. I am not going to quote you a number I cannot source.
The three lanes above describe how a bidirectional meter accounts for power, which is the arrangement described in the Alberta Utilities Commission micro-generation FAQ, read 26 August 2026. The energy versus non-energy split in the tool above is computed entirely from the two numbers you type in off your own statement. Nothing in it is a Raydn estimate.
Have a Master Electrician read my quote, freeFree. I read it line by line and tell you which parts are fair, including the parts where the other guy is right.
9. Cut the load first
Every kilowatt hour you stop using is a panel you do not have to buy
This is the section that costs me money to write, so believe it. Your array gets sized to your bill, which means a smaller bill is a smaller cheque. Fixing obvious waste before you size the system is almost always cheaper per kilowatt hour than generating that same kilowatt hour off a roof, and lighting is where the easy waste lives in most houses. Drag the slider and watch what comes off the quote.
The array, before and after
Solid panels are what a 7.5 kW array looks like. Dashed ones are the panels the load cut removes.
Why lighting is the first place I look
- Same light out of a fraction of the watts in. That part is not controversial and it is not new.
- Lighting runs in the dark hours, which is exactly when your roof is making nothing. So it is load you were always going to import and pay delivery on.
- A pot light is $100 a light installed at our posted rate, and a fixture swap is $120 a fixture plus material on a $180 service call. That is a small, known, one time number against a load that runs every evening for the next twenty years.
- It is reversible and boring, which is the highest compliment I give an electrical upgrade.
What that does to your solar payback
- Fewer kilowatt hours to cover means fewer panels for the same result, so less capital out the door for the same net position on the bill.
- The engineering stamp, both permits and the micro-generation application cost the same whether the array is 7 kW or 9 kW, so trimming panels trims the parts that actually scale.
- A smaller array is easier to fit inside the roof you actually have, which is the other ceiling from section 4.
- Do the retrofit first and the consumption history the application stands on is the real one, not the one you are about to stop having.
And the honest catch, because there is one. Cutting your consumption also lowers the system size the regulation will let you build, since the size is pegged to your annual use. That is not a problem and I am not going to pretend it is a trade off. You are not trying to own the biggest array on the street. You are trying to get your bill to zero for the least money, and the cheapest kilowatt hour in that equation is always the one you never used.
Fixture by fixture wattages, run hours and the utility default wattage tables behind them are in our LED savings calculator, which shows its sources for every number it uses. I am deliberately not putting a percentage saving figure on this page, because the honest answer depends entirely on what is in your fixtures right now. Sizing arithmetic here uses 1,200 kWh per kW per year for Edmonton and our posted range of $2.25 to $3.00 per watt. Pot light and fixture swap prices are our own posted rates.
10. The EV
The one new load that raises your ceiling instead of eating it
Every other thing you plug in makes your bill bigger and your solar cover less of it. A car does that too, except a car is the one load the regulator will let you size for before you have used a single kilowatt hour of it, because you can prove it with a bill of sale. That makes an EV and an array a genuinely good pair, and it is worth understanding before you buy either one.
Charging at noon, off your own roof
- This is self-consumption at the largest scale available in a house. The car is the biggest controllable load you own.
- The kilowatt hours never leave the building, so no delivery and no transmission on them.
- Every charger I install schedules this from an app. Set the window once.
- Works best if the car is home during the day, so shift workers and people who work from home get the most out of it.
Charging at eleven at night, off the grid
- Charged at whatever rate you are on, plus delivery and transmission, because it came down the utility's wires.
- Alberta has no residential time of use rate, so there is no overnight discount waiting for you. I checked, because people ask.
- Not wrong, and sometimes it is the only option. Just know it is the more expensive of the two.
Two things I will not let a salesperson tell you. A car does not charge itself off the roof automatically just because you own both, it charges when you tell it to. And an EV on the strength of a maybe does not raise your ceiling. The Alberta Utilities Commission wants proof of purchase or registration, which means paper, and the file gets reviewed one at a time. If the car is coming in the spring, that application waits for the spring. Our posted electrical prices for the charger itself: $1,995 for a receptacle, $2,795 hardwired, $3,495 where the run is genuinely difficult, and a load management device where the panel needs one, at $995 for a DCC-9 or $1,395 for a DCC-10.
Consumption figures for the slider range come from the Natural Resources Canada 2025 Fuel Consumption Guide, read 26 August 2026, where combined electricity consumption runs from 14.4 kWh per 100 km for a Hyundai IONIQ 6 Long Range to 21.0 kWh per 100 km for an Audi Q4 45 e-tron, with a Tesla Model 3 Performance at 16.7, which is where the slider starts. Take the real number off your own EnerGuide label. The gasoline comparison uses the NRCan conversion factor, quoted verbatim: “One litre of gasoline contains the energy equivalent to 8.9 kWh of electricity” (NRCan, EnerGuide label for battery-electric vehicles, read 26 August 2026). That is an energy comparison, not a cost comparison, and it says nothing about pump prices. The evidence list for sizing to a future load is the AUC micro-generation FAQ. Charger prices are our own posted rates, on the EV charger page.
11. Battery storage
What a battery actually buys you, and what it does not
I sell batteries and install them, and I am still going to talk you out of one if you are buying it for the wrong reason. There are three reasons people ask me for one. One of them is excellent, one is decent, and one is a story somebody sold them. Pick the one that sounds like you.
What it genuinely does
- Runs your furnace fan, fridge, sump pump and router through a February outage, which is the reason worth paying for in this province.
- Raises self-consumption. Surplus that would have gone out at noon comes back out of your own wall at nine at night instead of off the grid.
- Gives you a hard number for how long you can hold out, which you can size against your actual essentials rather than a guess.
- Works on an acreage or a shop where the grid is genuinely unreliable, and that is a different calculation entirely.
What it does not do
- It does not arbitrage your rate. You are charged and credited at the same rate, so buying cheap and selling dear across your own meter is not a thing that exists here.
- It does not make an undersized array bigger, and it does not generate a single kilowatt hour.
- It does not shrug off cold. Lithium loses usable capacity as the temperature drops and most banks stop accepting a charge below freezing. It belongs in a heated space, not on an exterior wall.
- At Alberta retail rates it does not pay for itself on a spreadsheet, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling, not calculating.
Batteries start at $2,499 on our posted pricing and go up sharply with usable capacity and continuous output. If you want to see the honest arithmetic instead of my summary of it, the battery page has a sizing tool that takes your actual essential loads and a temperature, derates the usable capacity for the cold, and tells you how many hours you get. It will also tell you when the answer is that you do not need one.
The same rate rule quoted in section 7 is what rules out the arbitrage case: Solar Club July 2026 fact sheet, read 26 August 2026, small micro-generators “must be charged and credited at the same rate”. Cold capacity behaviour and the per bank charge and discharge temperature windows are documented on the battery page against the manufacturers' own datasheets. Battery pricing is our own posted starting figure.
Have a Master Electrician read my quote, freeFree. Bring the battery quote too. I will tell you if the payback in it is real.
12. Our process
From first phone call to a meter running backwards
Nine phases. My crew of five does all of it, no subcontractors, and the same Master Electrician licence is on the permit from start to finish.
Nine phases. Three of them have a number attached.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
Filled amber is a phase with a stated cost, so phases 4, 5 and 6. Green is the day the meter starts running backwards. Everything else is included in the quoted price.
On the roof, in person
I measure the roof, check the age and condition of the shingles, look at the sun path and shade, and open your panel. Not a satellite photo. If your roof needs replacing in three years I will tell you to do that first.
FreeYour twelve months of consumption
We pull real kWh history, not an estimate. This sets the size ceiling and it is the number the application stands on.
Design and a written quote
Panel count, inverter choice, layout, and every line item including permits and engineering. You get the dollars per watt in writing so you can compare me to anybody.
Engineering stamp
An APEGA licensed engineer reviews and stamps the design.
About $450Permits pulled
City electrical permit and the Alberta Safety Codes permit, both under licence #13824.
About $220 and $180Micro-generation application filed
Filed with EPCOR or FortisAlberta. We handle the back and forth. You are not on the phone with a utility.
Installation
Racking and flashings, panels, conductors, disconnects, inverter, labelling. A typical residential system is a couple of days on site. Any panel or service work happens here too.
Inspection
The inspector attends. I meet them. If something needs correcting it gets corrected before anybody leaves.
Bidirectional meter and permission to operate
The utility swaps the meter, your site is flagged as a micro-generator, and the system is switched on. Then we sit down and make sure you are on the right rate plan, because being approved and being on the wrong plan is money left on the table.
Warranty: one year on electrical labour, five years on solar workmanship, and the manufacturer's warranty on the equipment on top of that. Panel recycling is $14 per panel from 1 October 2026 under the ARMA program, and I would rather you hear that from me now than find it later.
13. The day it switches on
Being approved and being on the right rate are two different things
This is the highest paid ten minutes on this entire page and hardly anybody spends it. The meter is swapped, the site is flagged, the app is showing production, and the homeowner assumes the money part now happens by itself. It does not. Here is the exact sequence, and I sit down and do it with every customer, because a beautiful array on a default rate is money left in the street.
Tap where you are right now. I will tell you the one thing to do next.
Get the micro-generator flag confirmed in writing before you talk about rates at all. Without the flag there is no credit mechanism behind the panels, so nothing else on this list can pay you.
Confirm the site is actually flagged as a micro-generator
Until that flag is set in the provincial site catalogue you are a house with panels on it and no credit mechanism behind them. This happens after inspection and the meter swap. Do not take the installer's word for it, including mine. Ask to see it.
NothingFind out which rate you actually landed on
Solar Club's own fact sheet says that once your site is registered as a micro-generator it will automatically be switched to the LO rate. LO is the right rate through the dark months and precisely the wrong rate in July. If nobody looks, you can sit on the low rate straight through your best export season.
One phone callSwitch to HI before the export season, not during it
The fact sheet says you can switch to the HI rate at any time. The month you flip from being a net importer to a net exporter is the month you want to already be on it. In Edmonton that turn happens in the spring, and my own metered record has March beating October, so do not wait for the weather to feel like summer.
One phone callAsk whether the retailer will switch it for you
Solar Club publishes a feature called RateSwitch, which their fact sheet describes as switching you between the HI and LO rates of your membership group when your status changes. If your retailer offers something like that, turn it on, because the alternative is you remembering twice a year forever. Get the answer in writing either way.
One phone callRead one full statement, line by line, with somebody
The first statement after commissioning is the one that teaches you the bill. Where the credit lands, what the delivery and transmission lines do, what the fixed daily charges are, and whether the rate on the paper is the rate you were promised. Bring it to me and I will go through it with you whether or not I installed the system.
FreeAnd the disclosure, again, in the same place you would want it. I am on this structure myself through Rewards Power, and they are my referral partner. That is exactly why the rate numbers on this page have primary source links on them instead of just my word, and why I keep telling you to get it confirmed in writing by the retailer rather than by the electrician.
Rate switching mechanics quoted from the Solar Club July 2026 fact sheet, read 26 August 2026: “Switch to the HI Rate at any time”, “Once your site is registered as a micro-generator, it will automatically be switched to the LO Rate”, and “RateSwitch takes this process one step further by switching you between the HI and LO Rates of your Membership Group when your status changes.” The do nothing figures are the EPCOR Rate of Last Resort energy rate of 12.01 cents per kWh effective 1 July 2026 and the administration charge of $0.230 per day per site, from the EPCOR Edmonton regulated rate tariff, July 2026, read 26 August 2026. The micro-generator flag and the role of the distribution facility owner are described in the AUC micro-generation FAQ. Retail rates change. Confirm the current numbers at the links.
Have a Master Electrician read my quote, free
Or I will do this switchover check for you
Name, address, phone. I pull your rate, tell you which of the five steps you are missing, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it. Whether or not I installed your system.
14. The order of operations
Solar, battery, EV charger. Which one first?
This is the second most common question I get, and the answer depends entirely on where you are standing right now. Pick the one that sounds like you.
You will notice I put the battery last in all three. That is deliberate. A battery is the right call for keeping your furnace and fridge alive through a February outage, and I sell and install them starting at $2,499. It is the wrong call if somebody is telling you it will pay for itself on rate arbitrage, because under the Micro-generation Regulation you are charged and credited at the same rate, so the spread that story depends on does not exist here. Section 11 takes the whole pitch apart. Read the honest version on the battery page.
The five levers, cheapest first
If you only take one thing off this page, take the order. These are every lever that moves the money on a solar house, sorted by what they cost you rather than by what they sound like. The free ones come first because they are free, not because they are small.
1Use it as you make it
Move your big loads into the solar window. Timers on the dishwasher, the car, the hot water tank and the pool pump. Costs nothing but an afternoon of setting schedules, and it takes kilowatt hours off the round trip that gets charged delivery and transmission. This is the only lever with no invoice attached to it, which is why it is first.
Free, and permanent. Section 8.2Be on the right rate, and switch it seasonally
Two phone calls a year, or one if your retailer will switch it automatically. Sitting on the low rate through your best export season is the single most common and most expensive mistake I see on finished systems, and it costs nothing to fix except remembering.
Free, ten minutes. Section 13.3Cut the load before you size the array
Lighting first, then whatever else is obviously wasteful. A one time cost against a load that runs every evening for twenty years, and it comes straight off the size of array you need to buy. Do it before the consumption history gets pulled, not after.
Costs the retrofit, usually pays back in months. Section 9.4Buy the array at an honest dollar per watt
The single biggest number in the whole exercise, and the one people spend the least time on because it is intimidating. Divide any quote by the watts. Every dollar of overpricing at the front is a dollar the panels have to earn back before you see anything, and there is no lever downstream that fixes an overpriced install.
Costs an afternoon of comparing. Section 6.5Do not leave the financing sitting at the full rate
If you financed it, put the end of the promotional period in your calendar the day you sign and talk to a broker before that date. A long term at the full rate can quietly take a share of everything the panels make, for years, while the system keeps working perfectly and you never notice.
Costs a conversation. Section 15.You will notice what is not on that list. The battery is not a return lever, it is an outage lever, and I have put my reason for that directly above. Neither is a bigger array, because the ceiling in section 4 is not mine to move. And neither is any trick with the meter, because under the Micro-generation Regulation you are charged and credited at the same rate and there is no clever version of that.
15. Paying for it
Financing is a bridge, not a destination
I have a finance diploma sitting behind the electrical ticket, and this is the part of the conversation where I tend to talk people out of things. There are two sensible ways to pay for a system you are not writing a cheque for, and one common way to quietly lose the benefit.
Path one: an instalment plan, used as a bridge
Financeit is what most solar companies in this country use, us included. It has a promotional intro period with an attractive rate, and then it steps up. Drag the term and watch what happens to the part of your loan sitting at the full rate.
Green is the promotional stretch. The other end is the full rate.
The bar shows the shape of a promotional structure, not your rate. Intro length, the rate after it, and any fees come from the lender in writing and they change. I will not put a made up interest rate on my own website. Ask me for the current Financeit terms and I will pull them up in front of you.
Path two: put it on the house
This is usually the cheapest money available to a homeowner. Using home equity or a line of credit, or rolling the system into your mortgage at your next renewal or refinance, generally means single digit interest instead of an instalment rate, and the system becomes part of the house it is bolted to. It stays with the property, same as the furnace.
No step up partway through.
For this we send people to Darren Sharko at Mortgage Connection, a broker we work with, so somebody who does this for a living can look at your actual situation instead of me guessing at it. He is not paid by us and we are not paid by him for the referral.
Broker details: Darren Sharko, Partner, Mortgage Connection, read 26 August 2026. Mortgage and equity rates depend on your lender, your equity and your qualification, and nobody can quote you one from a web page.
There is also the Clean Energy Improvement Program, which attaches financing to the property tax bill in participating municipalities. Our CEIP number is CEIP-02428. Whether it beats the mortgage route depends on your municipality and your rate, and I will walk through it with you. See the financing page for the current picture.
16. If you have already been burned
The questions I would ask, if I were you
A lot of my solar customers came to me annoyed. Somebody overquoted them, or promised something that did not survive contact with a utility. These are the things they actually asked me. Tap any of them.
?Another company quoted me thousands more. Who is lying?
Possibly nobody. Divide both quotes by the watts and compare the dollars per watt, then compare what is actually in them. A higher number can be honest if it includes a panel upgrade, a hard roof, premium equipment or a long conduit run. It is not honest when nobody can point at the reason.
Send me both. I will read them line by line for free and tell you which parts are fair, including the parts where the other guy is right. That is the whole idea behind the quote audit, and I have told people to go ahead with somebody else's quote before.
?A salesperson promised the system would wipe out my bill entirely.
Be careful with that promise. You will still have delivery and transmission charges and fixed site and meter fees on your account even in a month where you generate plenty, because those are for the wires, not the energy. What solar can genuinely do is take the energy portion to zero and push your account into credit, which is what happened on my own June and July statements this year.
Anybody promising you a $0 bill either means the energy line or does not understand the bill.
?What if I sell the house?
The array stays with the building, the same way a furnace does. If the system is financed through an instalment plan, that balance is yours and has to be dealt with at closing. If it is rolled into the mortgage, it goes into the same conversation as the rest of the mortgage. That difference is worth thinking about before you choose how to pay for it, not after.
?What if the export rate drops after I install?
It can. Retail rates are set by retailers and they change, which is exactly why I put a source link on the rate numbers on this page instead of just telling you a figure. Two things do not change with the rate. Power you use straight off your own roof avoids delivery and transmission charges no matter what the retail market does, and your panels keep producing for decades.
If somebody builds you a payback projection that holds one rate flat for twenty years, treat it as a sketch, not a promise. I say the same thing about my own projections.
?What actually breaks, and what does that cost me later?
The panels have no moving parts and carry a 25 year output warranty. The inverter is the piece with electronics working every daylight hour, and it is the one line item you should expect to spend money on again inside the life of the array. That is normal, not a defect, and it is the single most common thing left out of a twenty year payback slide.
Two things I will not do. I will not quote you a 2040 replacement price, because I have no honest basis for one. And I will not pretend the number is zero. What I will do is put the inverter's warranty term in years in writing on the quote, and tell you whether it is a string inverter or micro-inverters, because that decides whether a failure takes the whole array down or one panel. Section 5 on this page is that choice.
?What if you go out of business? You are a new company.
Fair question and I get it a lot. Raydn was founded in August 2025. That is the reason my name and licence number are on every permit rather than the excuse for it. If we were gone tomorrow, the work is inspected and permitted under a Master Electrician licence, the equipment warranties are with the manufacturers and not with me, and any electrician in the province can pick up a properly documented and labelled system.
I have also been on the tools for 14 years, and I put solar on my own roof in 2022 before I ever sold one. I am not going anywhere.
?Do panels work in the winter, honestly?
Honestly? In December, barely. My own roof made 3 kWh in December 2025 because the snow never came off the glass. In July 2026 the same roof made 1,358 kWh. Any company showing you a flat monthly average is hiding December from you.
That is not a problem, it is the design. The system is measured across a year, the summer surplus banks credits, and the credits pay the winter. That is the firewood story further up this page, and it is why Alberta works for solar despite the winters.
?What about hail, and do I have to tell my insurance company?
Tell them. Before the install, not after. Call your home insurer, say you are adding a roof mounted solar array and a grid tied inverter, and ask them three questions in this order. Is the array covered under my existing policy or does it need to be scheduled separately. What is my deductible if hail damages it. Does my premium change. Get the answers in writing or in an email, because a verbal yes from a call centre is worth nothing at claim time.
On hail itself, I am not going to quote you a survival rate I cannot source. What I will do is put the panel's own hail impact rating from the manufacturer datasheet on your quote, in writing, beside the model number, so you can hand that number to your insurer and to me. If a company will not give you that page, that tells you something.
What I can tell you from my own roof is that it has been up since September 2022 and through four Alberta summers, and the worst month it ever had was snow, not hail. 3 kWh in December 2025. That is a data point, not a guarantee.
Still have a question this page did not answer?
Then it belongs on here, and I would like to hear it. Call me and ask. If it is a good question I will add it to this page so the next person does not have to ask.