Your electricity company is the city itself
Energy Edmundston, or Energie Edmundston, is the city's own municipal utility. It is one of only three municipal distribution utilities named in New Brunswick's Electricity Act, alongside Saint John Energy and the Perth-Andover Electric Light Commission. Everywhere else in the province NB Power distributes the electricity, and everywhere else the programme people mean when they talk about net metering in New Brunswick is NB Power's programme.
Edmundston generates about 8.5 MW of its own power and buys the rest wholesale from NB Power, but a wholesale relationship is not the same as being an NB Power customer. Your rates are set by city by-law rather than by NB Power's tariff, which means they move through council rather than through the process that sets NB Power's prices. It also means that an article, an installer or a savings calculator describing NB Power's residential programme is describing somebody else's utility, not yours.
Two smaller practical points follow from municipal ownership. The utility serves the Saint-Basile area as well as the city itself. And a new customer opening an account pays a connection fee plus a deposit equal to two months of estimated electricity use, which is worth knowing if you are buying a house here at the same time as planning an array.
Whether you can export power here is an open question
This is the part no other page about solar in Edmundston is likely to tell you straight. Energy Edmundston publishes no residential net metering programme and no solar buyback programme. A search of its own material turns up nothing under net metering, self-generation, microproduction or photovoltaic headings. That absence is real, and it was checked rather than assumed.
The absence does not mean export is forbidden. The utility's by-laws were read as well, and they contain no prohibition: nothing in them addresses customer generation, backfeed or power flowing in either direction. The record is silent both ways rather than negative.
That silence is genuinely ambiguous because of how the province's Electricity Act is written. A municipal distribution utility may buy locally generated power in accordance with that utility's own policy. The word carrying the weight is may. Such a policy is permitted rather than required, so publishing nothing is equally consistent with there being no export arrangement at all and with there being an unpublished one handled case by case. Reading the silence as a no would be a guess, and reading it as a yes would be the same guess pointed the other way.
What that means for you is concrete. Do not accept an installer's assurance in either direction, and do not accept a payback calculation that assumes exported power earns anything, until the utility has told you in writing what happens to it. Ask Energy Edmundston directly: whether a residential customer may connect a grid-tied solar system at all, what becomes of power that flows back into the distribution system, what metering is required, and what that metering costs. Only a direct answer from the utility, or a council decision adopting a policy under the Electricity Act, settles the question.
One piece of context worth having when you call. The city has built solar itself: SOLSTICE, a 1 MW rooftop project on two municipal buildings. That tells you the utility is not hostile to the technology. It tells you nothing about what a residential customer is permitted to do, because a municipal project on city buildings is the utility installing on its own property, not a customer connecting to the grid.
How to plan a system before you have that answer
An Edmundston roof returns about 1,136 kWh a year for each kilowatt of panel installed, and that figure does not depend on the policy question at all. What does depend on it is how much of that production is worth anything to you.
If export turns out not to be available, only the electricity you consume as it is generated has value, and the sensible system is a smaller one matched to daytime household load rather than to annual consumption. Which appliances can run in the middle of the day starts to matter, and the case for storage changes shape, because a battery becomes the only way to move midday production into the evening. If export is available on some terms, a larger array can make sense, but the terms decide how much larger.
So ask for both. A quote that prices one array and one payback figure, without stating which of those two worlds it assumes, has skipped the question that decides whether its number means anything. Two sizings with the assumption written next to each is a reasonable thing to ask any installer for in this city, and an installer who cannot produce them has not thought about Edmundston specifically.
The physical checks are ordinary and can be done while you wait for the utility to answer: which roof planes face near south, what shades them through the middle of the day, and how much service life the roof covering has left. Panels last far longer than shingles, so a roof close to due gets replaced before an array goes on it rather than after.
The permit category nobody has published
Edmundston's permit page lists new construction, additions, and interior alterations as its categories. It does not list solar installations. That leaves a real question about which bracket a rooftop array falls into, and the brackets are not interchangeable.
The published turnarounds differ by category: 10 business days for new construction, 5 business days for additions, and 48 hours for interior alterations or repairs. Base fees run from $25 to $50, and refundable deposits range from $250 to $5,000 depending on the category. A deposit at the top of that range is a meaningful sum to have tied up even temporarily, so the classification is not a trivial administrative detail.
None of that can be resolved from the page itself. Contact Development Services with the specifics of your project and ask which category applies, what deposit is required, when it comes back, and how long the review takes. Do it before you agree to an installation date, and get the answer yourself rather than relying on an installer's recollection of a different job in a different town.
Roof ownership, and what financial help exists
Edmundston's housing stock is favourable for rooftop solar. Nearly 59% of dwellings are single-detached houses, 58.9% precisely, which is the case where one owner controls the roof and can decide alone. Another 20.8% sit in low-rise apartment buildings, where the roof is a building asset and the decision belongs to a landlord or a board rather than to a resident. 7.4% are duplexes sharing a roof between two households, and row housing at 3.1% and high-rise at 1.6% are both minor shares here.
If you share a roofline, the electrical work is still yours alone: your panel, your meter, your account, and no effect on the neighbour's supply. The shared parts are structural, and the one that catches people out is the eventual re-roof, which becomes a joint decision the moment an array sits on one section of the roof. Settle that with the household on the other side before the design is fixed.
On money, there is no local programme to budget for, because none is published. The federal Clean Technology ITC is worth ruling out early. Under the Income Tax Act it goes to taxable Canadian corporations and certain trusts rather than to individuals, so it does not help a household here whatever the utility situation. Eligibility is the whole question with it, so confirm your own situation before counting on it. NB Power's Total Home Energy Savings Program, the provincial rebate that used to help with residential solar, stopped taking solar enrolments on 27 May 2026 and is not available for a new project.