Net billing, not net metering, and why it changes sizing
Manitoba Hydro is the sole electricity distributor in Morden, and its programme for customer generation is net billing. In plain terms: the electricity your panels produce and your house uses at the same moment never touches the meter, so it displaces power you would have bought at the residential energy charge of 9.970 cents per kWh. The electricity your panels produce and your house does not use flows out to the grid and Manitoba Hydro pays you the excess energy price for it, currently $0.07173 per kWh, or 7.173 cents.
That gap is the whole design problem. A kilowatt hour consumed inside the house is worth more to you than the same kilowatt hour sold, so the value of an array depends heavily on how much of its output your household actually uses as it is generated rather than on how much it generates in total. Two houses with identical systems and identical annual production can end up in noticeably different positions if one runs its heavy loads during daylight and the other does not.
The practical consequences are ordinary but real. Sizing to cover your annual consumption on paper is not the same as sizing for value, because the surplus half of the year is paid at the lower price. Running the dishwasher, laundry and any electric vehicle charging during the day moves kilowatt hours from the export column to the self-consumption column at no cost. And an installer's proposal should show self-consumption and export separately, because a single annual production figure hides the number that matters.
What Manitoba Hydro charges, and what solar does not offset
Manitoba Hydro's residential rate in Morden is a flat energy charge of 9.970 cents per kWh. It is not time-of-use, so there is no peak window to avoid and no overnight discount to shift into. That simplifies things: every kilowatt hour costs the same whenever you buy it, and every kilowatt hour your array displaces is worth the same whenever it lands.
On top of the energy charge sits a basic monthly charge of $9.84. Two things about that figure are worth knowing. It is the standard residential basic charge, and a service rated above 200 amps carries a further $9.84 on top of it, so a larger residential service pays the basic charge twice. Both figures took effect on January 1, 2026 under Public Utilities Board Order 1/26.
Solar does not offset the basic charge. Net billing works on energy, so even an array that covers your full annual consumption leaves the monthly basic charge on the account, along with any taxes and charges that apply to it. Any projection showing a Morden bill reaching zero has misunderstood the account structure, and that is a useful test to run against a proposal before looking at anything else in it.
Getting connected, and the price you get connected at
Connecting a system means signing an Excess Energy Purchase Agreement and submitting an Interconnection Request to Manitoba Hydro, and having a bi-directional meter installed so that imports and exports are measured separately. The agreement is what establishes that the utility will buy your surplus, and the meter is what makes the arithmetic possible. Neither is optional, and both should appear on an installer's schedule rather than surfacing after the panels are up.
The excess energy price is not fixed for the life of the system. The current price of $0.07173 per kWh is in effect until March 31, 2027, and it is reset each year. Since 2020 that price has ranged from $0.02403 to $0.07173 per kWh, so today's figure sits at the upper end of its recent range and a lower one is well within precedent.
That history is the reason to be careful with long-run projections. A twenty-five year payback model that holds the export price at today's number for the whole period is assuming something the recent record does not support. A more defensible way to read a Morden proposal is to check how it behaves if the export price falls back toward the lower end of that range, which is another argument for designing around self-consumption rather than around export volume.
Permits and inspections in Morden
Morden requires a building permit for new construction, additions, attached garages, detached accessory buildings, decks above grade, basement development and similar work, and for any building over 10 square metres. Replacing shingles, siding, doors or windows with the same material needs no permit. The city's published list does not name solar arrays in either direction, which means the sensible move is to ask the building department about your specific installation rather than assuming from the list.
Ask early, because one Morden rule has teeth: starting work without an approved permit doubles the fee. That is a straightforward penalty for getting the sequence wrong, and it applies whether the omission was deliberate or an honest reading of an ambiguous list.
Electrical hookup is handled separately, through Manitoba Hydro rather than the city. So a Morden project can involve two parallel tracks, the municipal building question and the utility interconnection, and they are not administered by the same people. Agree with your installer who is responsible for each, and make sure the answer is not that each assumed the other had it.
Morden roofs, and the small number with heritage strings
Morden has 3,995 dwellings, of which 66.8 percent are single-detached houses with an independent roof. Low-rise apartments account for 11.6 percent, row housing 8.4 percent, semi-detached homes 5.9 percent, duplexes 0.9 percent and high-rise units 1.1 percent. So two thirds of local households are in the straightforward position where the roof decision is theirs alone, and roughly a fifth are in a building where a landlord, a co-owner or a shared wall enters the conversation.
There are no homeowners associations in Morden. What exists instead is a city heritage register on which specific properties have been individually designated, such as 577 Stephen Street and Maple Leaf School, designated a Municipal Heritage Site in 1988. Most homes carry no designation and face no heritage constraint on exterior changes at all. Only the specifically listed addresses do, so the question is simply whether yours is one of them, which the city can answer.
Beyond ownership and heritage, the ordinary roof questions apply. Which planes face closest to south, what pitch they carry, how the mounting ties into the structure and, importantly, how old the roof covering is. Replacing shingles under an installed array costs considerably more than doing the two jobs in the right order, so if the roof is within a few years of needing work, deal with that first.