What a Coquitlam roof produces in a year
Natural Resources Canada models Coquitlam at roughly 975 kWh a year for each kW of installed panel capacity on a well oriented array. That is the multiplier for a first estimate: a 5 kW system produces close to 4,900 kWh a year, an 8 kW system close to 7,800. Treat it as an annual figure. The year is heavily weighted toward the long days on either side of midsummer, and a panel under thick winter overcast returns a small share of its rating, so the honest picture is a strong summer and a thin winter rather than an even twelve months.
After the yield number, the roof decides the outcome. A south facing plane collects the most across a year, east and west planes give up some annual total but spread production through the morning and afternoon, and a north face rarely earns its racking. Usable area is always smaller than the roof looks: vents, chimneys, plumbing stacks and perimeter setbacks come out before the first panel is placed, which is why a quote written after a site visit is worth more than one written from an aerial image. Shade deserves proper measurement rather than a glance, because a single shaded module can pull down an entire string unless the design uses microinverters or per panel optimisers.
What connecting to BC Hydro looks like now
Coquitlam homes connect to BC Hydro. On 1 July 2026 BC Hydro closed Rate Schedule 1289, the net metering rate, to new customers, and new solar customers enrol in Rate Schedule 2289, the self generation rate. If you are reading older material about Coquitlam solar that describes net metering, it is describing a rate you can no longer join, so it is worth being precise about what the current one does.
The half that survived unchanged is the half that matters most. Your panels power the home first, so any production that coincides with something running in the house never reaches the meter at all. Beyond that, your generation is still netted against your consumption inside each billing period, exactly as before. Only what is left over at the end of that period is treated differently.
That leftover is where the change lives. Instead of banking surplus kilowatt hours and drawing them down later at retail value, BC Hydro converts a surplus at the close of a billing period into a bill credit at a fixed 10 cents per kWh, applied against energy charges only, for systems up to 100 kW. Two details follow from that wording. Because the credit applies to energy charges, it reduces the portion of your bill that moves with consumption and leaves the fixed charges on the account, so solar shrinks a Coquitlam bill rather than erasing it. And because 10 cents sits below the residential energy rate, an exported kilowatt hour is worth less than one you keep.
One more thing to be clear about, since it is widely misunderstood: BC Hydro time of day pricing is opt in. The default residential rate is still the tiered one, and installing solar does not put you on peak and off peak pricing. If you already had net metering before the change, you keep Rate Schedule 1289 until ten years have passed from your own initial service start date, so the protection runs from your connection date rather than from July 2026.
Your roof, and Coquitlam's housing mix
Coquitlam has 55,950 dwellings and 63.3% are ground oriented: single detached houses at 35.2%, duplexes at 15.4%, row houses at 9.8% and semi detached homes at 2.9%. The remainder splits between low rise apartments at 21.2% and high rise apartments at 15%, so apartments together are 36.2% of the stock. For solar that split is really a split in who decides. In the ground oriented majority the owner decides; in the 36.2% living in apartments, the roof is common property and any array is a strata level project.
If you are in a strata building, that is a different project rather than an impossible one. The array is approved by the strata, funded from the reserve fund or a special levy, and sized against the consumption of the building, often its common area load: elevators, corridor lighting, parkade ventilation and pumps. That kind of load runs steadily through the day, which suits a rate that settles exports each billing period, because most of the production ends up consumed on site rather than credited at 10 cents.
Duplexes at 15.4% and row houses at 9.8% sit in between. The home may feel like a house while the roof above it is common property under the strata plan, so read the plan or ask the property manager before you commission a design. For a detached house, the sequence is the ordinary one: confirm the roof covering has years of life left, since panels outlast shingles and re-covering afterwards means paying to remove and reinstall the array; check midday shading on the planes you would use; and have the electrical service assessed, because the main panel has to accept a back fed breaker sized for the inverter.
Sizing to your own daytime load
Under the old rate, sizing a system was mostly an annual sum: total your consumption for a year, size the array to match it, and let the summer surplus carry the winter. Rate Schedule 2289 breaks that arithmetic, because surplus no longer waits around as energy. The question that replaces it is narrower and more useful: how much of what this array produces will the house actually use at the moment it is produced?
That reframes several decisions. It makes the first few kilowatts of an array the most valuable, since they are the ones most reliably absorbed by baseline household load, and it makes each additional kilowatt beyond your daytime use worth 10 cents rather than the retail rate. It gives west facing roof capacity a second look, because output later in the afternoon lines up better with a household coming home. And it turns load shifting from a hobby into a design lever: an EV charged in the afternoon instead of overnight, a heat pump water tank on a midday timer, laundry and dishwasher cycles run at noon rather than at nine in the evening.
It also changes the case for storage. A battery holds midday production for evening use, capturing the difference between the 10 cents an export earns and the residential energy rate an import costs, a difference the grid used to absorb for free under net metering. That does not make a battery cheap, and it should still be weighed against its own cost, but it is a stronger proposition under the current rate than it was under the old one. The starting point for all of this is the same: a year of your own BC Hydro consumption history, not the square metres of roof available.
Rebates and financing available in BC
The BC Hydro solar and battery rebate offers up to $5,000 for residential solar, at $1,000 per kW of installed generator capacity, capped at 50% of the total installed cost. Battery storage paired with solar earns $500 per kWh up to $1,500, with a 5 kWh minimum and the same 50% cost cap, rising to up to $5,000 where the battery is enrolled in Peak Saver. Since 1 June 2026 the work has to be done by a member of the Home Performance Contractor Network for the rebate to apply, so make contractor eligibility a first call question rather than a late discovery.
Taking the rebate places you on the Self Generation Service rate. For a new Coquitlam installation that is where you were headed anyway, so it costs a new customer nothing; it is only a genuine trade off for a homeowner already holding the older net metering rate, who would be giving up their remaining grandfathered years to claim it.
Federally there is less than there was. Applications for the Canada Greener Homes Loan, interest free to a limit of $40,000, closed on 2 October 2025, and funding now continues only for loans approved before that date. The Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program that replaced it delivers no cost retrofits through provincial partners for low to median income households; solar is federally eligible, but each province sets its own technology list. Canada has no federal investment tax credit for residential solar, so a quote built around one is using American numbers. British Columbia has at times exempted qualifying solar equipment from provincial sales tax, and the scope changes with provincial budgets, so confirm the current PST treatment of your equipment when you buy.