Your building permit does not come from town hall
Riverview's building permits are administered through Plan360, a shared regional permitting service, rather than directly by the town. That is unusual enough that homeowners regularly start in the wrong place, and installers from outside the area sometimes do the same.
The town's own planning page does not mention solar panels specifically and does not publish a review-time target, so there is no published answer to how a solar application gets categorized or how long it takes. Ask before you book an install date, and ask through the permitting service rather than assuming a neighbouring municipality's process applies to you.
When your installer says the permit is filed, ask which service it was filed with and get the file reference. An application sitting in the wrong queue is the kind of delay nobody notices until the crew is already scheduled and the equipment is on a truck.
A shared regional service cuts both ways for a homeowner. On the useful side, an installer who works across the region files through the same process for several municipalities, so an experienced local contractor should know exactly what a Riverview submission needs. On the other, the counter is not down the road and the staff are not the town employees you would ordinarily call about a property question, so plan on doing the permit conversation by phone or online rather than by dropping in.
The other approvals, and who issues each one
Three separate bodies touch a Riverview solar installation. Plan360 handles the municipal building permit. The province requires an electrical wiring permit and an inspection by the New Brunswick Department of Public Safety. NB Power owns the interconnection: the application, the written approval, and the meter.
The sequence matters. NB Power targets 10 business days to review a net metering application. Everything after that, the installation itself, the inspection, the AMI meter swap and the grid connection, typically takes 30 to 90 business days. The system cannot legally be energized before NB Power's written approval and the compatible meter are both in place.
None of the three is optional and none substitutes for another, so a project plan that names only one of them is incomplete. The question worth putting to any installer quoting here is simply which of the three they file, and which they expect you to handle yourself.
What Riverview roofs produce, and who controls them
1,142 kWh a year per installed kilowatt is the planning number for Riverview. A 6 kW array is therefore near 6,900 kWh a year and a 9 kW array near 10,300. Most of that arrives in the long days either side of midsummer, and a snow-covered panel produces nothing until it clears, so the annual figure is the one to design from rather than any single month.
63.6% of dwellings here are single-detached houses whose owners decide alone. 15.7% are in low-rise apartment buildings, where the roof is a landlord or condo-board asset rather than a resident's to offer. 7.9% are semi-detached and 5.5% are row housing, both sharing a roofline, and 0.8% are high-rise, a small but real share.
On a shared roofline the electrical system is still entirely yours: your meter, your panel, your account, and no effect on the neighbour's supply. It is the structure and the eventual re-roof that are joint, so establish where your roof ends and get the neighbour's agreement recorded before mounting hardware is ordered.
For detached owners the pre-install checks are the ordinary ones: shading through the middle of the day, which planes face near south, and how much life the shingles have left. Panels outlive a shingle roof, so an aging roof gets replaced first, not after.
What the electricity is worth, and what help is left
NB Power credits exported electricity at the same volumetric rate you pay for it, one for one, with no tiered or time-of-use split, so no hour of generation is worth more than another. Credits roll over month to month and then reset to zero each March 31, with no payment for an unused balance. The 100 kW programme cap is far above household scale, so your own annual consumption is what should set the system size.
On incentives, the provincial one has closed. NB Power's Total Home Energy Savings Program paid $200/kW toward residential solar up to a $3,000 ceiling on a 15 kW system, and solar enrolment ended on May 27, 2026. The federal Clean Technology ITC is not help you can use. Its eligibility rules confine it under the Income Tax Act to taxable Canadian corporations and certain trusts, so it should not go into a household payback estimate at all.