Two distributors, and why your sector decides everything
Baie-Comeau's electricity comes from two different distributors, and this is not a technicality. Electricite Baie-Comeau, the city-owned utility, serves the Marquette sector: roughly 5,000 customers across more than 110 km of lines, under the city's own municipal rate bylaw. It is a member of the Association des redistributeurs d'electricite du Quebec, the association of Quebec's municipal redistributors. Marquette homeowners open, modify or ask about service directly with the city, on 418 296-8133, rather than through Hydro-Quebec.
The Mingan sector is Hydro-Quebec territory. There, net metering runs through Hydro-Quebec's option d'autoproduction under the residential Tarif D: surplus banked in kilowatt-hours and offset against later consumption, with the bank cleared on a two-year cycle.
If you are in Marquette, do not assume the Hydro-Quebec arrangement applies to you, and do not let a quote assume it either. A municipal distributor sets its own terms for customer generation, so the first step is a direct question to the city utility: does it permit a customer-owned generator to connect, what happens to electricity exported to its network, what interconnection process and metering it requires, and what that costs. Ask for the answer in writing before you sign anything, because it decides whether a system sized to bank a summer surplus makes any sense at your address.
The city's residential quartiers include Sainte-Amelie, La Chasse, Saint-Nom-de-Marie, Saint-Georges, Saint-Sacrement, Mgr-Belanger, Trudel and N.-A.-Labrie. Which utility serves which street is a question for the city rather than for an installer, and it is worth settling on day one.
What a Baie-Comeau roof can produce
Natural Resources Canada's municipal photovoltaic potential table gives Baie-Comeau about 1,139 kWh a year for each kilowatt of installed capacity on a well-oriented, unshaded surface. That is the number to multiply a quoted system size by before adjusting for your own roof. The adjustments are the ordinary ones: an unshaded slope facing generally south produces the most, east and west slopes give up a share, a north slope rarely repays the mounting hardware, and shading from trees or a neighbouring structure costs the most because it lands in the middle of the day.
Winter changes when the energy arrives more than how much of it there is over a year. Production concentrates around the summer months, and a panel under snow produces nothing until the snow slides or melts, which happens sooner on a steeper pitch. Whether that seasonal shape matters financially depends entirely on the sector question above: with a kilowatt-hour bank you can carry a summer surplus onto a winter bill, and without a confirmed export arrangement you cannot, which makes matching production to daytime consumption far more important.
That is the practical reason to settle the utility question before the system size. A design that makes sense with a bank and a design that makes sense without one are not the same design, and the difference is measured in kilowatts and in dollars.
Permits: solar is not on the exempt list
Baie-Comeau answers the permit question clearly. Solar panels are not on the city's list of work exempt from a permit, so a standard building-permit application applies. Fees are set out in Chapter 9 of the Reglement sur les permis et certificats, calculated under that chapter rather than published as a single flat number for solar.
What the city does not publish is a review timeline for solar work. Plan on that basis: do not sign a contract whose deposit is exposed to an approval date nobody has committed to, submit a complete file, and agree in writing who assembles the application and who follows it up if it goes quiet. An incomplete application is the most common reason a straightforward approval takes months.
On heritage, the news is good for most homeowners. Baie-Comeau's heritage register cites only two properties, and both are churches: Eglise Sainte-Amelie and the Anglican Eglise Saint-Andrew et Saint-Georges. Heritage review therefore does not reach ordinary residential streets here, so a typical Baie-Comeau house faces the permit process without an additional architectural-review step attached to it.
The housing stock and who controls the roof
Baie-Comeau has 9,555 dwellings, and about 65 percent of them are ground-oriented homes, single-detached, semi-detached, row houses or duplexes, where a roof is owner-controlled rather than building-controlled. Single-detached houses alone are 51.7 percent of dwellings, which is the simplest position: one owner, one roof, one decision.
Low-rise apartments are 22.7 percent of dwellings and are concentrated in a few quartiers rather than spread evenly. In those buildings the roof belongs to the landlord or, in a co-ownership, to the syndicate, so rooftop rights sit with the building's ownership rather than with a resident. Semi-detached houses, row houses and duplexes together account for about 13 percent of the stock, and those usually mean a shared roof structure, which makes fixings, penetrations and future roof access a joint decision that is much easier to settle before a design is drawn.
High-rise apartments are almost nonexistent at 1 percent of dwellings, so shading from tall buildings is not a typical obstruction here. That leaves trees and terrain as the shading variables worth measuring on site. Finally, check the roof covering before anything else: panels outlast most coverings, so one within a few years of replacement should be replaced first rather than after, which also saves you a second trip through the permit process.
Grants, and the eligibility question to settle first
Hydro-Quebec's LogisVert residential solar grant pays $1,000 per kW of installed capacity and covers up to 40 percent of eligible project costs, typically landing around $5,000 to $6,000 on a residential system. Installations must be completed on or after June 30, 2025, and the claim goes through the LogisVert portal within 9 months of the installation date. Hydro-Quebec's own projection is that the grant brings a typical residential payback from 25 to 30 years down to roughly 10 to 12 years.
In the Mingan sector, where Hydro-Quebec is the distributor, that is straightforward. In the Marquette sector, served by the city's own utility, whether and how the programme applies to a customer of a municipal distributor is a question to put to the programme in writing before you sign a contract. The claim window runs from the installation date, so an eligibility dispute discovered afterwards is not something you can fix in time.
Federally the options have narrowed. The Canada Greener Homes Loan, interest-free up to $40,000, stopped accepting new applications on October 2, 2025, and only previously approved loans are still being funded. The Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program replaced it in September 2025, delivering no-cost retrofits through provincial partners for low- to median-income households, with solar PV federally eligible but each province setting its own technology list. Canada has no federal investment tax credit for residential solar.