Roof or ground: what the lot lets you do
In sectors with room around the house, a ground-mounted array is worth pricing against a roof-mounted one rather than assuming the roof wins. A ground mount can be set at the tilt and orientation you want instead of the ones the roof happens to have, it is easier to clear of snow, and it takes maintenance access off a ladder. Against that, it needs a frame and foundations the roof already provides, a trench and a longer cable run back to the service, and it occupies land you might want for something else.
The trade is site-specific enough that the honest answer is to have both priced. What tips it most often is the roof itself: if the usable planes face east and west, are shaded in the afternoon, or sit on a covering with only a few years of service life left, the roof's apparent cost advantage narrows quickly. Natural Resources Canada's dataset gives Mirabel 1,193 kWh a year per kW of installed capacity on an unobstructed installation, and that benchmark applies to whichever mounting a well-oriented array uses.
Whichever you choose, the utility process is identical. A licensed electrician who is a member of the Corporation des maîtres électriciens du Québec submits the connection request to Hydro-Québec, which issues a conditional authorization and then a final one, and the system cannot be energized until the final authorization is in hand.
How Hydro-Québec pays you, and when it stops
Under the option de mesurage net, surplus production is banked as a kilowatt-hour credit rather than a dollar amount, and it offsets later consumption one for one. That parity is the good exchange rate, and it applies to everything you eventually consume yourself. The bad exchange rate arrives at the reset: the bank is zeroed every 24 months, on 31 March of an even year, and any positive balance at that moment is paid out at a wholesale price well below what you pay to buy a kilowatt-hour back.
For a Mirabel homeowner with space for a larger array than the house needs, that rule is the one to internalise. Roof or field, extra capacity beyond your own annual consumption does not accumulate value; it produces surplus that either sits in the bank until the reset clears it cheaply or never gets used at all. The programme's capacity ceiling was raised from 50 kW to 1 MW in 2026, so nothing regulatory stops you building bigger. Your own consumption is what should stop you.
Tarif D also shapes the calculation. It is a two-tier block rate, with a lower price for roughly the first 40 kWh of a day and a higher price above that, and it is not time-of-use, so no hour of the day is worth more than another. Hydro-Québec's access charge is billed per day rather than per month, and solar does not offset it: an array offsets energy, not the charge for being connected.
Permits, zoning and whether PIIA reaches your address
Mirabel's Service de l'aménagement et de l'urbanisme handles permits and can confirm whether a project needs a plan d'implantation et d'intégration architecturale review. The city's zoning map and grille de zonage tool let you check the zone and the applicable rules for a specific property before you apply, which is worth doing early in a municipality this large, where the rules attached to a rural sector and to a newer subdivision are not the same.
Mirabel has no US-style homeowners' association. Its PIIA regime applies mainly to commercial, industrial and public-use construction, plus properties in designated heritage village sectors, the secteurs villageois patrimoniaux, and certain new residential developments, rather than to an ordinary single-family home outside those areas. That is genuinely good news for most detached houses here, but it is a general pattern rather than a ruling on your address, and the city directs homeowners to the Service de l'aménagement et de l'urbanisme to confirm whether a PIIA applies to a specific property.
The city does not publish a specific permit fee or turnaround time for residential renovation work. Treat both as unknowns to be resolved by a phone call rather than assumptions to be built into a schedule, and get the required document list before you file so that the application goes in complete the first time.
Duplexes, detached houses and who decides
Single-detached houses account for 54 percent of Mirabel's dwellings, so more than half the city's homeowners control their own roof outright. Low-rise apartment buildings under five storeys hold 26.5 percent, where the roof is common property and the decision belongs to the syndicate of co-owners. High-rise apartments are almost absent at 0.6 percent and row houses at 0.5 percent, so those situations are rare here.
The duplex share is 14.6 percent, which puts a shared roof structure into a meaningful part of the housing stock, with a further 3.5 percent semi-detached. On a duplex, the questions that decide feasibility arrive before equipment selection: how the array's load is carried through structure shared with the other dwelling, how a penetration is detailed where the assembly continues past the party wall, and whose written consent is on file. A ground mount, where the lot allows one, sometimes sidesteps that conversation entirely, which is another reason to price both options on a shared-roof property.
For any building type, the same three variables drive the quote: orientation and shading of the usable planes, remaining service life in the roof covering, and headroom in the existing electrical service. Replace a covering near the end of its life before an array goes on it rather than paying to remove and reinstall panels later.
Storage alongside a roof or ground array
Storage comes up in most solar conversations, and the answer in Quebec is more constrained than the pitch. Tarif D has no time-of-use periods, so there is no hourly price gap for a battery to exploit. Hydro-Québec's net metering bank already credits surplus in kilowatt-hours and returns it one for one, so sending production to the grid and drawing it back later achieves what storage would achieve. On the energy side, the grid is already doing the job.
Backup is the real case. A battery with appropriate switching keeps selected circuits running when supply is interrupted, and what that is worth depends entirely on how often your address loses power and what it costs you when it does. That is a judgment you can make from your own experience of the last few winters; it is not something an installer's model can tell you.
There is a practical wrinkle if the array is ground-mounted. The battery and the inverter equipment do not have to sit where the panels sit, and putting them in a garage or a service room rather than at the far end of a cable run is usually the sensible arrangement. Raise it at design stage, because the trench, the conductor size and the equipment location are decided together, and changing one after installation means revisiting the others.
Grants and financing available in Quebec
Hydro-Québec's LogisVert grant pays $1,000 per kW of installed capacity, capped at 40 percent of eligible project costs, and typically works out to $5,000 to $6,000 on a residential system. Because the cap is a share of eligible costs, a ground mount's extra structural and trenching cost does not translate into a proportionally larger grant once the cap binds, which is one more input into the roof-or-ground comparison. 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.
Federal support is limited. 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 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. There is no Canadian federal investment tax credit for residential solar.