Net metering is closed, and what replaced it
BC Hydro closed Rate Schedule 1289 to new customers on July 1, 2026. Customers already on it keep that rate for 10 years from their own service start date, which is why a neighbour who installed earlier may describe terms you cannot get. Anyone connecting now enrols in Rate Schedule 2289.
Under 2289 the arrangement is a dollar credit rather than a kilowatt-hour bank. Electricity you export during a billing period earns a fixed 10 cent per kWh credit applied against your energy charges, for systems up to 100 kW. That is a fixed price rather than one that tracks the retail rate, so it does not rise as electricity prices do, and it is applied to energy charges specifically rather than to the whole bill.
Panels still power the home first. Only the surplus that your house is not using at that moment flows to the grid and earns the credit, which is the single most useful fact for deciding how large a system should be.
Why this makes self-consumption the whole game
With a fixed export credit, a kilowatt-hour you use as you generate it and a kilowatt-hour you export are worth different amounts, and the gap is not a matter of opinion. Self-consumed power is worth whatever you would otherwise have paid for it. Exported power is worth 10 cents. So the same panel earns different returns depending on whether anyone is home.
That argues for sizing against your own consumption rather than against available roof area, and for shifting flexible load into daylight where you can. Running the laundry, the dishwasher or an EV charger while the array is producing converts an exported kilowatt-hour into one you never had to buy.
Ask your installer to model the split between self-consumed and exported production on your own usage, not just an annual production total. Two systems with identical output can be worth quite different amounts under 2289, and an annual figure hides exactly the thing that decides it.
You are not on time-of-day pricing unless you chose it
BC Hydro's time-of-day pricing is opt-in. Unless you have actively chosen to switch, you remain on the standard tiered rate, and that is worth confirming before anyone builds a savings model around peak and off-peak periods.
It matters here because advice written for time-of-use jurisdictions treats the timing of your consumption as a pricing question, with expensive afternoon hours and cheap overnight ones. On a tiered rate the question is different: what matters is how much you use in total across the billing period, not the hour it lands in.
So if a proposal shows you savings from shifting usage away from an expensive peak window, ask which rate it assumed. Under 2289 there is still a strong reason to use your own generation as it is produced, but that reason is the export credit, not a peak rate.
Permits: the city's lists do not mention solar
Prince George requires a building permit for renovations, repairs or additions to an existing building. Rooftop solar is a genuine gap in the published guidance: neither the city's list of projects that need a permit nor its list of projects that do not mentions it.
That is not a reason to assume you need nothing, and not a reason to assume the worst either. It is a reason to ask before work starts. Development Services is where to confirm, on 250-561-7611 or at devserv@princegeorge.ca, and the city also runs a Permit and Zoning Chatbot for requirement questions.
One procedural detail worth passing to your contractor: completed application packages are emailed to Development Services rather than filed at a counter. Agree who is sending the package and who is following it up, because a project waiting on an email nobody sent looks exactly like a project waiting on the city.
Being on the Heritage Register is not the same as being protected
If your property is on Prince George's Heritage Register, that alone does not restrict what you can do to it. The register exists to flag sites so the city can share historical information with owners, and the city describes it as monitoring alterations rather than preventing them.
The instrument that does restrict alterations is a formal Heritage Designation, which lets the city regulate future changes or prohibit demolition. Those are two different statuses and it is easy to hear the first and assume the second.
Worth knowing because the assumption runs in the expensive direction. An owner who believes a register listing blocks solar may never get a quote, and a contractor who assumes the same may decline the job. Confirm which status applies to your address before treating it as a constraint.
Roofs here, and what they produce
Plan on roughly 1,056 kWh a year for every kW installed. The figure comes from national photovoltaic potential data rather than measurement on local roofs, so it is the number for deciding whether to pursue quotes rather than one to hold an installer to. It is a modest figure, which means design quality matters: a shaded or poorly oriented plane costs proportionally more when the whole array has less production to work with.
Single-detached houses are 58.1 percent of the 31,795 private dwellings here, so most owners control a full roof plane and the decision end to end. Apartments in buildings under five storeys are 14.9 percent and buildings of five or more storeys 1.8 percent, where the decision belongs to a landlord or strata rather than the occupant.
The rest needs its own handling. Apartments or flats in a duplex are 7.8 percent, where one roof is shared between two households and the array feeds a single electrical service. Row houses are 5.8 percent and semi-detached houses 4.1 percent, both bringing narrower roof planes and shared structure at the party wall. Movable dwellings are 7.5 percent, a structural type an installer has to assess separately from a conventional house roof rather than quoting from an aerial image.