What a Stratford roof generates in a year
Stratford's modelled solar yield is 1,140 kWh per year for every kW of capacity you install. A 5 kW system therefore corresponds to about 5,700 kWh a year, 8 kW to roughly 9,120 kWh, and 12 kW to around 13,680 kWh. Those are multi-year averages: a particular summer can come in above or below without anything being wrong with the equipment.
The right way to use that number is to divide it into your own consumption rather than to admire it on its own. Twelve months of hydro bills gives you an annual kWh figure; dividing that by 1,140 gives the array size that would roughly match a year of your usage. Everything above that line generates credits you may not be able to spend, and everything below it leaves some of your bill untouched, so the decision is about where between those two points you want to sit and what the roof can physically hold.
Festival Hydro publishes all three time-of-use prices
Festival Hydro is the local distribution company for Stratford, and residential time-of-use customers pay 9.8 cents/kWh off-peak, 15.7 cents/kWh mid-peak and 20.3 cents/kWh on-peak on the standard schedule. Having all three numbers in front of you is genuinely useful, because it lets you check an installer's savings model instead of taking it on faith: a kWh your array covers during an on-peak hour is worth roughly twice one it covers off-peak, and the mid-peak band sits between the two.
Festival Hydro also offers an Ultra-Low Overnight plan as an alternative to standard time-of-use pricing. That plan concentrates the cheapest electricity in the middle of the night, which is worth a serious look if you charge an electric vehicle or run electric heating overnight, and is worth considerably less if your consumption is mostly daytime. Solar production is zero overnight in either case, so the plan choice is really about the electricity you still buy rather than about the electricity you make.
Revisit the plan question once the system has been running for a season. Installing solar changes your load profile: the daytime draw that used to sit at mid-peak and on-peak prices largely vanishes, and what remains is weighted toward evening and night. The plan that was optimal for the house before the array is often not the optimal one after it, and the switch costs nothing but a phone call.
How the credits work, and where they stop
Ontario net metering credits exported electricity kWh-for-kWh at the retail rate against your future bills. Credits carry forward for up to 12 months, and there is no cash payment for a net annual surplus, so the practical ceiling on a worthwhile system is your own annual consumption rather than the size of your roof. Festival Hydro is the utility you apply to and the one that administers the arrangement on your account.
The threshold that decides how simple your connection application is moved recently. On May 1, 2026 the Ontario Energy Board raised the simplified micro-embedded generation limit from 10 kW to 12 kW, which brought a band of larger residential systems into the streamlined process. If you were told at some point that a system in that range would face a more involved review, that advice may be out of date.
A quarter of Stratford lives in apartment buildings
52.9% of Stratford's dwellings are single-detached houses, just over half, which is a lower share than most Ontario municipalities of this size. Another 20% are in low-rise apartments and 5.6% in high-rise buildings, so more than a quarter of all dwellings here sit in buildings where the resident does not control the roof. If you rent or own a unit in one of those, a rooftop array is a decision for the landlord or the condo corporation, not for you, and the useful move is to ask whether the building owner has looked at it rather than to price a system for your own unit.
Shared-wall housing adds another layer. 10.4% of dwellings are semi-detached and 6.4% are row houses, and both share a roof line with a neighbour. That constrains the layout: fire access pathways and setbacks from the party wall reduce the usable area, and racking, conduit or scaffolding that crosses the property line during installation needs the adjoining owner's cooperation. It is entirely doable, it simply needs raising before the design is fixed rather than on install day.
4.5% of dwellings are duplexes, where one roof frequently serves two separate legal units. The question of who is entitled to install, who owns the hardware and whose account the credits land in has to be settled in writing first. For the single-detached majority none of this applies and the constraints are the ordinary physical ones: roof age, orientation, pitch, shading and whether the electrical panel can take the interconnection without an upgrade.
Stratford names solar directly on its permit list
Stratford's building permit list names 'solar projects (installation of solar collector systems, solar hot water systems, etc.)' as work that requires a permit, which removes the ambiguity some municipalities leave in place. You do not have to interpret a general renovation clause here; the city has said solar is in scope.
Fees are set under Building By-Law #112-2005 and are mostly calculated by building square footage, though some project types carry a flat fee instead. Two implications for a homeowner. First, the fee is not a percentage of your solar contract, so it does not scale with how many panels you buy. Second, payment is due in full when the application is submitted, not on issuance, so it belongs in the up-front side of your budget rather than as something to settle later.
Ask your installer whether the permit fee is inside their quoted price or billed to you separately, because both arrangements are common and the difference is easy to miss when comparing two proposals. Electrical work carries its own oversight through the Electrical Safety Authority in addition to the municipal building permit, so expect two approval tracks running alongside each other.
How broadly Stratford defines an alteration
Ontario has no US-style homeowners' associations, so nothing private governs the appearance of your house. In Stratford the binding overlay is heritage, and it is more extensive than in most towns this size: the city has a designated heritage conservation district plus more than 90 individually designated Part IV heritage properties.
What sets Stratford apart is the breadth of the definition. A heritage permit is required for any 'alteration', and the city defines that term to include restoring, renovating, repairing or disturbing a property inside the district or individually designated. Roof work sits comfortably inside that definition, and so does a visible solar array. If your property carries either status, assume the heritage permit is part of the project rather than a possibility, and find out early.
The programs that exist right now
Ontario's Home Renovation Savings Program is the main provincial route. It launched in January 2025, and its expanded 2026-27 program year runs from April 1, 2026 to March 31, 2027 with combined rebates of up to $10,000 for solar PV paired with battery storage. The rebate is built around that pairing, so a standalone array is a different proposition from a solar-plus-storage one under this program.
The condition that most affects your system design is easy to miss: homeowners taking the HRSP solar incentive are generally directed to a load-displacement configuration rather than full net metering. In other words, this is a choice between two approaches rather than a discount applied to the net metering setup described above. Have your installer model both against your own consumption before committing, and confirm the current rules, since the program has already been revised once.
Federal support has narrowed. New applications to the Canada Greener Homes Loan, which lent up to $40,000 interest-free, stopped on October 2, 2025, and the programme now funds only files approved before that date. Its successor, the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program, has been running since September 2025 and delivers no-cost retrofits through participating provinces, which do not currently include Ontario, to low- and median-income households, with solar PV federally eligible but each province setting its own technology list. There is no Canadian equivalent of the American residential tax credit, so ignore US cost comparisons entirely. Some municipalities and utilities occasionally offer local improvement charge or on-bill financing that can be applied to solar; it is worth asking about while you are quoting, but it is not something to build a plan around.