Who administers approvals in Stonewall
Stonewall requires a permit for both construction and occupancy, and zoning and land use are administered by the South Interlake Planning District rather than by the Town alone. The District works under the Town's Zoning By-law and its own Development Plan, and building standards come from Building By-law 05-23. For a homeowner that means the question is not just what the rules say but which office applies them to your address.
Neither the fee schedule nor a review turnaround time is published on the Town's site. So there are two numbers you cannot look up, and the only way to get them is to ask before you schedule an installer. Contact the Town and ask which office receives a building permit application for a roof-mounted array, what a permit costs, how long a review takes and whether an occupancy consideration is triggered at all by adding equipment to an existing dwelling.
The reason to run that conversation early is simple sequencing. A permit application waiting at the wrong desk does not get forwarded and does not tell you it is stuck. Ten minutes on the phone before equipment is ordered eliminates a failure mode that would otherwise sit invisibly on the critical path while an installation date approaches.
Net billing, the export price, and the size ceiling
Manitoba Hydro is Stonewall's sole electricity distributor, and its programme for customer generation is net billing. Exported electricity is bought from you at an excess energy price, currently $0.07173 per kWh and in effect until March 31, 2027. Electricity you import is charged at the residential energy charge of 9.970 cents per kWh. Those are different prices, and everything about sizing follows from that.
The programme allows systems up to 100 kW, which is far more than a house needs and is therefore not the constraint that matters. The real constraint is the price gap. A kilowatt hour used in the house at the moment it is generated saves you the retail energy charge, while a kilowatt hour exported earns the lower excess energy price, so a larger array that exports more of its output returns less per panel than a smaller one sized close to daytime household consumption.
The export price is also reset annually and has ranged from $0.02403 to $0.07173 per kWh since 2020, which puts today's figure at the top of its recent range. Ask an installer to run the numbers at the bottom of that range too. A system that still makes sense at the low end is one whose value rests on displacing your own consumption rather than on the price Manitoba Hydro happens to be paying this year.
A flat rate, and the charge that stays
Manitoba Hydro's residential energy charge is flat at 9.970 cents per kWh. There is no time-of-use pricing, no seasonal split and no tiered structure, so a kilowatt hour costs the same at every hour of the day and in every month of the year. That takes a whole layer of complexity out of evaluating a quote: you never have to work out whether your production lines up with an expensive pricing window, because there is not one.
The basic monthly charge is $9.84, effective January 1, 2026 under Public Utilities Board Order 1/26. That is the standard residential figure, and a service rated above 200 amps carries a further $9.84 on top, so a larger residential service pays the basic charge twice. Check which applies to your own service rather than assuming, particularly if the home has been upgraded for electric heat, a workshop or vehicle charging.
Generation does not offset the basic charge. Net billing settles energy, so a well-performing array shrinks the energy line and adds an export credit while the basic charge sits unchanged underneath. Any Stonewall proposal projecting a bill that reaches zero has the account structure wrong, which is a quick and useful test to apply before examining anything else in it.
Stonewall roofs and what to check on them
Stonewall's housing is strongly ground-oriented. Single-detached houses make up 77.8 percent of its 2,050 dwellings, low-rise apartments account for 14.6 percent, and row, semi-detached and duplex units together come to under 6 percent, with no high-rise buildings reported. In a town of 5,046 people, that means the large majority of households can make a solar decision without a landlord, a co-owner or a board being involved.
So the questions are physical rather than procedural for most people here. Which roof planes face closest to south, what pitch they carry, whether a tree or a neighbouring structure shades them when the sun is low, and how the electrical panel is laid out. Ask an installer to show you the shading assessment rather than describe it, since low winter sun casts long shadows and a summer site visit can miss an obstruction entirely.
Roof age is the other thing to settle before signing. Panels commonly outlast shingles installed at the same time, and removing an array to reroof and then refitting it is an expense you can design around simply by reshingling first. If the covering is within a few years of replacement, do that work before the array rather than after. And plan for snow: a covered panel produces nothing, and a steeper pitch sheds it sooner than a shallow one, so the tilt with the best modelled annual figure is not automatically the tilt that generates the most on a real Stonewall roof.
There are no homeowners associations here. The land use layer is public: the Town's Zoning By-law and the South Interlake Planning District's Development Plan, rather than a private covenant or condo corporation. That means the rules that apply to your property are published and you can ask about them directly, which is not the case where a private association sets its own conditions.
Incentives, and the one that closed in 2018
Manitoba Hydro's Solar Energy Program rebate closed in 2018 and cannot be applied for today. If it appears anywhere in a proposal for a Stonewall house, that proposal is quoting something that does not exist, and the rest of its arithmetic deserves checking too. The mechanism a homeowner actually applies for now is net billing: a signed Excess Energy Purchase Agreement, an Interconnection Request and a bi-directional meter that measures imports and exports separately.
Efficiency Manitoba runs residential energy programmes and its offerings change from year to year. Verify what is currently open at the time you buy rather than working from an older description, and ask to see the programme's own page instead of a figure typed into a quote.
The federal Clean Technology investment tax credit is also recorded for Manitoba, but it is not something you can claim as a homeowner: the Income Tax Act limits it to taxable Canadian corporations and certain trusts. It is framed as an investment tax credit rather than a household rebate, so confirm with a tax advisor whether it applies to your situation. Taken together, a Stonewall project has four things to nail down before any deposit: which office handles the permit, what it costs, what the export price does to your payback at the low end of its range, and what condition the roof is in.