Bathurst names solar in its permit rules
The city's building-permit page treats solar as its own thing rather than leaving you to work out which category it falls into. Both roof-mounted and ground-mounted panels require a building permit. That is a useful starting point, because the answer to whether you need a permit is published rather than something you have to extract from a phone call and then hope the installer heard the same thing.
The ground-mount detail matters if you have land. Ground-mounted arrays are only permitted in certain zones in Bathurst. A ground mount can be attractive: you choose the tilt and the orientation rather than accepting whatever the roof gives you, there are no roof penetrations, and clearing snow off the panels is possible in a way it is not three storeys up. None of that helps if the zoning on your lot does not allow it, so check the zone before paying anyone to design one.
For a roof mount, the permit exists because you are adding weight and hardware to a structure. Expect the city to want to know what is going on the roof and how it is attached, and expect your installer to produce that detail as a matter of course rather than as an extra.
How long the approvals take, stacked up
Bathurst publishes what most municipalities do not: building permit applications can take up to two weeks to process. At the time this was checked, a temporary notice on the same page cited a minimum of roughly 10 business days for initial review during a high-volume period, so two weeks is a planning figure rather than a guarantee, and a busy season pushes it out.
The utility runs on a separate track. NB Power targets 10 business days for its own review of a net metering application, and that clock is independent of the city's. The two can run at the same time, which is worth telling your installer explicitly, because sequencing them one after the other adds weeks to the project for no reason at all.
Then comes the part that dominates the calendar. After NB Power's approval, it typically takes 30 to 90 business days for the installer to complete the work, for the New Brunswick Department of Public Safety to inspect it, for the AMI meter swap, and for the connection itself. A two week permit estimate is not a two week project. Plan on months from signature to switch on, and treat the permits as the easy part rather than the milestone.
Production per kilowatt on a Bathurst roof
A Bathurst array returns about 1,165 kWh a year for each kilowatt installed. A 6 kW system is therefore in the region of 7,000 kWh a year and a 9 kW system around 10,500. That is a yearly total and it arrives unevenly: most of it lands in the long days either side of midsummer, very little during a snow-covered week, and daily output is decided by cloud and shade rather than by anything you can adjust after installation.
Which is why orientation and shading get settled before the contract is signed. A plane facing near south will outproduce an east or west plane over a year, a north plane is rarely worth covering, and one tree or chimney shadow crossing the array in the middle of the day takes a bigger bite than most people expect.
Ground mounting changes that calculation where zoning allows it, because you pick the angle instead of inheriting it and the array stays reachable for snow clearing. Weigh that against the extra structure, trenching and cabling a ground mount needs, and against the zoning check that has to come first.
Who owns the roof in Bathurst
56.9% of Bathurst dwellings are single-detached houses whose owners have full control of the roof, which is the simplest possible starting point. The 2021 structural-type data reports no high-rise apartments in the city at all, so the building-scale complications that dominate housing decisions in a larger city barely feature here.
The rest is a mix. 21.3% of dwellings are in low-rise apartment buildings, where the roof is the landlord's asset and a tenant cannot authorize work on it. 8.7% are duplexes and 7.3% are row housing, both sharing a roofline, which makes structure and any future re-roof a joint matter even though the electrical system stays entirely yours.
For an owner of a detached house, the useful preparation is unglamorous: check the age of the shingles, identify which planes stay unshaded through the middle of the day, and find out where the electrical service enters the house. Those three answers shape a quote more than the brand of panel does.
Export credits, and what is left of the incentives
NB Power credits what you export at the same volumetric rate you pay for power, one kilowatt hour for one kilowatt hour, and it does not split those credits into tiered or time-of-use rates. Credits carry over month to month and are erased every March 31, with nothing paid out for a leftover balance. Systems are capped at 100 kW, which is not a residential constraint, so annual household consumption is the real ceiling on a sensible system size.
The provincial rebate that used to sit on top of this is gone. NB Power's Total Home Energy Savings Program covered residential solar at $200/kW to a $3,000 ceiling on a 15 kW system, and solar enrolment closed on May 27, 2026. The federal Clean Technology ITC is not what remains, despite how often it is cited. The Income Tax Act restricts it to taxable Canadian corporations and certain trusts, so it should never appear in a household payback figure.