Saint John Energy, not NB Power, sets your terms
Saint John Energy is the city's own distribution utility, and the programme it runs is net billing rather than kilowatt for kilowatt net metering. That distinction is not a technicality. Under the provincial programme that covers the rest of New Brunswick, an exported kilowatt hour is credited at exactly the rate you would have paid to buy it. Here, an exported kilowatt hour is credited at 90% of avoided cost, currently 8.15 cents per kWh, while the electricity you draw from the grid is priced at 14.31 cents per kWh, effective May 2026.
So an exported unit and an imported unit are not the same thing in Saint John. Electricity you send out to the grid is worth a bit over half of what the same electricity costs you when you draw it back later in the day. Every sizing and equipment decision on this page follows from that single asymmetry.
The practical consequence is that using your own generation matters here in a way it does not elsewhere in the province. A kilowatt hour consumed inside the house at the moment the panels make it avoids a purchase at the full retail price. The same kilowatt hour pushed onto the grid earns the lower credit instead. Running a dishwasher, a dryer or a water heater in the middle of the day is worth real money in Saint John, and worth nothing at all in a town where the credit and the retail rate are identical.
There is no time of use element to the residential rate here, so there is no cheap hour and no expensive hour to shift load into. The only spread worth designing around is the one between what you pay for power and what an export earns you.
What connecting actually costs, and what the published fee is not
Saint John Energy publishes a $239.74 application fee for standard net metering. Read that carefully, because it is an application fee and nothing more. It is not what it costs to get a system connected, and treating it as the total will leave a hole in your budget.
Two further costs sit on top of it. Virtual net metering, which is a different arrangement from the standard one, carries its own engineering review fee of $599.33. And whichever route applies to you, the connection requires a bi-directional meter, which carries an additional cost difference that the utility does not publish as a flat number. The real total is the application fee, plus the meter cost difference, plus the engineering review if virtual net metering is what you are applying for.
When you compare quotes, ask the installer to separate what the price includes from what the utility will bill you directly. A quote showing $239.74 as the whole of the utility's share is not wrong about the fee, it is incomplete about the cost. Ask Saint John Energy what the meter difference comes to for your specific service before you sign anything, because it is the one figure nobody can look up for you.
Two approvals also sit outside the utility entirely. A provincial electrical wiring permit is required, and a New Brunswick Electrical Authority inspection has to be completed. Saint John Energy will not connect the system until both are done, which puts them on the critical path rather than in the pile of paperwork you tidy up afterwards.
What a Saint John roof produces, and how big to build
Design work in Saint John starts from a yield of roughly 1,133 kWh per installed kilowatt per year. On that basis a 6 kW array lands near 6,800 kWh over twelve months and a 9 kW array near 10,200. Read those as yearly totals rather than a monthly figure repeated: generation piles up through the long days around midsummer, thins badly in winter, and stops completely while snow sits on the glass.
Aspect and shading move that total more than any equipment decision does. Output is highest on a face pointed close to due south. Faces pointed east or west still work, trading some of the yearly figure for generation weighted toward the morning or the evening, while a face pointed north seldom justifies the panels on it. Shading is the expensive variable. One chimney, one plumbing vent or one tall tree crossing part of the array for an hour or two each afternoon costs a surprising amount of output, and it is the reason any credible design begins with somebody measuring shade on the roof itself instead of scaling a satellite image.
Sizing here is a different exercise from sizing in an NB Power town. Because exports are credited below what you pay, the value of the array drops off once it starts making more than the household can absorb as it is generated. Have a full year of statements in front of you at the first meeting, and ask each installer what proportion of the annual output their model assumes you will consume on the spot instead of exporting. That proportion, not the available roof area, is what makes the arithmetic work in this city.
Who actually controls the roof in Saint John
Saint John's housing mix means that for a large share of residents the first question is not a technical one. 40.1% of dwellings are single-detached houses, where the roof has one owner and the decision is one person's to make. 38.1% are apartments, 31.3% of them in low-rise buildings and 6.8% in high-rises, and in those the roof is part of the building rather than part of the unit.
In between sits 19.4% of the stock in housing that shares a roofline: 10% duplexes, 6.1% row housing and 3.3% semi-detached. If that is your home, the electrical side is still entirely yours. The array feeds your service panel and your meter, and your neighbour's supply is not involved. What is shared is structure and timing. The roof plane may cross a property line, mounting hardware can land on rafters common to both units, and re-roofing a decade from now becomes a conversation with the household next door rather than a decision you make alone. Establish where your roof ends, and get your neighbour's position recorded, before any racking is ordered.
Renters, and owners of apartment units, cannot take the individual route at all. The roof is a building asset, so the opening move is a proposal to whoever holds the building, aimed at a system covering the whole roof rather than a quote written for one home.
For a detached house, the one sequencing decision worth getting right is the roof covering. Shingles wear out long before panels do, so if the roof is close to due, replace it first and put the array on a surface that will outlast the mounting hardware.
Heritage Conservation Areas and exterior work
Saint John designates specific Heritage Conservation Areas, and inside them the Heritage Conservation Areas By-Law regulates all exterior work, roofing included. A rooftop array is exterior work on a roof by any reading of that, and a Heritage Permit has to be in hand before work starts.
Checking is cheap, because there is no fee for the general permit. Skipping the check is not. Proceeding without the permit draws a $200 penalty, and more importantly it leaves you having installed something a reviewer never approved. Find out whether your address falls inside a designated area before a designer commits to a particular roof plane, because the answer can push the array onto a face with a different production estimate than the one you were quoted.
The municipal permit side is less clearly published. The city's Permitting and Inspection service lists a Residential Property permit application among its categories and requires permits for construction, renovation and demolition, but its public permitting page does not name solar panels and does not publish a turnaround time. There is nothing to look up that tells you which category your project falls under or how long the review takes, so put both questions to Permitting and Inspection by address, early, and treat their answer as the authoritative one even if a contractor has told you something different.
Why storage is a different question here
In most of New Brunswick a battery does little for the electricity bill, because the grid credits an export at the same rate an import costs, so sending power out now and drawing it back later is already an even trade. Saint John is the exception. An export here earns 8.15 cents per kWh and a later import is charged at 14.31 cents per kWh, so the grid is not a free warehouse. Electricity held in a battery and used in the house later is worth the full retail rate, which gives storage a stronger case in this city than anywhere else in the province.
That does not make a battery cheap or automatic, and nobody should sell you one on the strength of a single comparison. It makes it a calculation worth actually running: how much of your annual generation would otherwise be exported, and what the equipment costs measured against the spread it recovers. Ask for that comparison in writing rather than accepting storage as an upsell or waving it away.
On the money side, do not budget for the federal Clean Technology ITC. It is a corporate credit: the Income Tax Act restricts it to taxable Canadian corporations and certain trusts, so a homeowner adding storage cannot claim it. Whether your own project and your own tax position qualify is governed by eligibility rules, so put that to an accountant before you let the credit shrink the price you are comparing.
The provincial rebate homeowners most often ask about is no longer available to anyone. NB Power's Total Home Energy Savings Program stopped accepting solar enrolments on 27 May 2026, so it cannot form part of a new project anywhere in New Brunswick. If a quote in front of you still shows it as a deduction, that quote was built from an out of date template and its bottom line is wrong.