What a New Westminster roof produces in a year
Natural Resources Canada models New Westminster at roughly 996 kWh a year for every kW of installed panel capacity, on a well oriented array with clear sky access. In practical terms that is about 5,000 kWh from a 5 kW system, 6,000 kWh from 6 kW, 8,000 kWh from 8 kW and 10,000 kWh from 10 kW. It describes an idealised roof rather than yours, so use it to sanity check a projection: an installer forecasting far more from a comparable array should be able to explain the assumptions behind the difference.
Direction and obstruction do most of the work in closing the gap between the model and a real installation. A south facing plane gathers the highest annual total, east and west planes trade some of that for production across more of the day, and a north facing plane rarely justifies its mounting hardware. The area a designer can actually use is smaller than the roof looks, and shading needs measuring on site rather than estimating from an aerial photograph.
The annual figure also smooths over a strongly seasonal year: most production arrives in the long days around midsummer, and winter output under heavy cloud is a small fraction of nameplate capacity. How much that matters depends on how your utility settles generation, which here works differently from almost everywhere else in the province.
Your utility is the City, and the BC Hydro rate change is not yours
New Westminster operates its own municipal Electrical Utility rather than taking service from BC Hydro. That single fact separates this page from most solar advice being written about British Columbia right now. BC Hydro closed its net metering rate, Rate Schedule 1289, to new customers on 1 July 2026 and replaced it with a self generation rate that credits exports at a fixed 10 cents per kWh. New Westminster is unaffected by that closure. If a quote, an article or a neighbour in another municipality tells you net metering is over in BC, it is not over here.
What applies to you instead is the City's Net Metering Rate 500. Systems up to 50 kW can offset a customer's electricity use, and net energy produced is credited at the customer's existing retail rate, measured through a bidirectional meter. This is genuine net metering in the sense homeowners usually mean it: the credit tracks the rate you pay rather than a separate, lower export price. Note also that the City's utility does not run time of day residential pricing, so there is no peak period to aim generation at.
The administrative consequence is simple but easy to get wrong: you apply through the City's Electrical Utility, not through BC Hydro. An installer who works mainly outside New Westminster may reach for the BC Hydro process by habit, so confirm at the quoting stage that they have done a Rate 500 connection here and know what the City's application involves. The 50 kW ceiling is far above anything a house would install, but it becomes a genuine design input for a strata considering a building scale array on a larger roof.
Crediting at your retail rate changes how you should size
Because net energy produced is credited at your existing retail rate, a kilowatt hour you export and a kilowatt hour you consume on the spot are worth broadly the same to you. That sounds unremarkable until you compare it to what BC Hydro customers now face, where an export returns a fixed price below the retail energy rate and self consumption is therefore worth more. The whole strand of current BC advice about shifting load into daylight hours and sizing to your daytime consumption is a response to that gap, and here that gap is not the governing feature of your rate.
So sizing against your household's overall electricity use remains a coherent starting point here, bounded by what the roof physically holds, by the 50 kW limit in Rate 500, and by the fact that the rate is framed around offsetting a customer's own consumption. A year of your own bills is still the right input, but you are not being pushed toward a smaller array by the export price the way a BC Hydro customer is.
It also changes the case for a battery. Storage is rated a low value proposition on this utility, and retail rate crediting is exactly why: if the grid already credits you close to what you would otherwise pay, there is little price gap for a battery to capture. That does not make storage pointless, it makes it a different decision. Backup power through an outage is a resilience benefit, and it is a reasonable thing to pay for on its own terms, but it should not be sold to you here as an arbitrage play.
For seven households in ten, the roof belongs to the building
New Westminster's 36,100 dwellings are dominated by apartments: 34.8% low rise and 34.7% high rise, which is 69.5% of the city combined. Single detached houses are 13.9%, duplexes 10.2%, row houses 5.7% and semi detached homes just 0.6%. For most households here, then, rooftop solar is not a purchase decision, it is a governance one.
In an apartment building the roof is common property, so there is no version where an individual owner installs above their own suite. The workable route is a proposal to the strata: an array sized against the building's shared consumption, the corridor and parkade lighting, ventilation, pumps and elevator load that runs on the building meter, approved under the strata's alteration rules and funded from the reserve or a special levy. It generally starts with an assessment of the building's own electricity use rather than a panel layout, and it is where the 50 kW ceiling in Rate 500 stops being trivia and becomes a number the design has to respect.
For the 13.9% in single detached houses, the decision is yours alone and the remaining questions are physical: how much life the roof covering has left, since replacing it under a mounted array means paying to remove and refit, and whether the electrical service can accept a back fed breaker sized to your inverter. Duplex owners at 10.2% and row house owners at 5.7% sit in the middle: the home may feel detached, but the roof plane above you is frequently common property under the strata plan, so read the plan and bylaws before you commission a design.
What the building permit application actually asks for
Building permit applications for alterations in New Westminster require a current title search, dated within 30 days. That sounds trivial and it derails schedules regularly, because a title search pulled at the start of a long shopping process is stale by the time an application is ready. Pull it close to submission rather than early, and check the date before you file.
For strata properties, a Consent of Strata form is part of the application. This is the detail that changes the character of a strata project here: the strata's agreement is not an informal courtesy you obtain in parallel, it is a document the City expects in the file. In a city that is 69.5% apartments, that puts the strata approval on the critical path rather than beside it, so start the conversation with the council before you spend money on drawings.
Depending on the scope of the project, the City's online system may also require a Tree Permit, a Development Permit or a Heritage Alteration Permit before the application can proceed. The phrase to notice is before the application can proceed: these are gates in front of the building permit rather than steps running alongside it, and discovering one late resets your timeline rather than trimming it. Ask the City early what its system will require for your specific address, and get that answer before you agree an installation date with a contractor.
Queen's Park, and the phrase visible roofline
New Westminster has one Heritage Conservation Area, the Queen's Park neighbourhood. For properties there carrying Protected status, a Building Permit for new construction, demolition, or any change affecting the front, sides or visible roofline requires a Heritage Alteration Permit as well.
That last phrase is the one that matters to a solar project, because a roof mounted array is precisely a change to a roofline, and whether it is a visible one depends on which plane the panels go on. The rule therefore reaches into the design rather than sitting beside it: panel placement is a heritage question in Queen's Park, not only an engineering one. If your property has Protected status, put the question to the City with your proposed layout in hand rather than after a design has been paid for, since the answer may steer the array to a different plane and change the production estimate that goes with it.
Outside Queen's Park the position is much simpler. Being on the City's Heritage Register alone does not add the Heritage Alteration Permit requirement, so across Sapperton, Queensborough, the West End, Connaught Heights, Moody Park, Glenbrooke North, Brow of the Hill, Downtown and the rest of the city, a listing by itself is not a barrier to a rooftop array. The distinction worth carrying is between being listed and being Protected in the conservation area, because only the second changes what a permit application has to clear.
Rebates, financing, and one question to settle first
The headline provincial incentive is the BC Hydro solar and battery rebate: up to $5,000 for residential solar at $1,000 per kW of installed generator capacity, capped at 50% of the total installed cost, with battery storage earning $500 per kWh up to $1,500 on a 5 kWh minimum and rising to as much as $5,000 where the battery is enrolled in Peak Saver. Since 1 June 2026 the work has to be carried out by a member of the Home Performance Contractor Network.
Before building any of that into a budget, settle one question. It is a BC Hydro programme, and one of its own conditions is that claiming it places the customer on BC Hydro's Self Generation Service rate, a rate you are not on and would not be moving to, since you take service from the City. Whether a New Westminster Electrical Utility customer can claim it is therefore something to confirm directly with both BC Hydro and the City before it appears as a line in your financial case. Ask early: the answer changes the economics of the project more than any equipment choice will.
The rest of the support is not utility specific. The Canada Greener Homes Loan, interest free up to $40,000, stopped taking new applications on 2 October 2025 and now funds only loans already approved, so the interest free route many earlier projects used is closed. Its replacement, the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program, works through provincial partners to deliver no cost retrofits to low and median income households, with solar federally eligible although each province publishes its own technology list. There is no residential solar investment tax credit at the federal level in Canada. British Columbia has at times exempted qualifying solar equipment from provincial sales tax, and the scope moves with provincial budgets, so confirm the current PST treatment of your equipment at the time of purchase.