The zoning by-law does not exclude your front roof slope
Under zoning by-law no. 0651, a roof-mounted solar panel in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu may face the front yard. Two conditions attach. The panel cannot project more than 1.5 m from the roof surface, and on any roof pitched steeper than 3 in 12 it must sit parallel to that slope rather than being racked up to a different angle.
For most houses those conditions cost you very little. A typical pitched residential roof is steeper than 3 in 12, so the practical instruction is flush mounting, which is how the large majority of rooftop arrays are installed anyway. The 1.5 m projection allowance is generous enough to cover normal racking hardware. What it does mean is that if your best-oriented slope is shallow and you were hoping to rack the panels up to a steeper angle, you should check your actual pitch against the threshold before designing around a tilt.
The practical benefit of all this is that the aspect question stays an engineering question. If the sunniest, least shaded plane on your house happens to face the road, the by-law does not take it away from you, and you can choose the roof plane on its merits.
Ground and pole mounting, and the riparian strip
A ground or pole-mounted array is permitted, within limits that are specific enough to design against. It must sit at least 2 m from a property line, stand no taller than 4 m, span no more than 10 m in width, and carry no exposed wiring. It must also sit outside any riparian protection strip.
That last condition is the one to check first if your property touches water. A lot that backs onto a watercourse can have a substantial part of its rear yard inside a protection strip, and that is often exactly the open, unshaded ground a ground mount wants. Establish where the strip line falls on your lot before you plan an array around it, because a design that crosses it will not be approved and the alternative locations may be shaded.
For a property without that complication, the allowances are workable. A structure up to 4 m tall and 10 m wide holds a meaningful array, and unlike a roof it can be pointed and tilted at whatever angle suits the site. That makes ground mounting a genuine option here rather than a consolation prize, particularly for a house whose roof is shaded, undersized or due for replacement.
Yield, the rate, and who controls the roof
Natural Resources Canada puts Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu's photovoltaic potential at 1,180 kilowatt hours a year for each kilowatt of installed capacity at optimal tilt. Shading, orientation and pitch move a real installation off that figure in the usual ways, and snow cover on a flush-mounted array through mid-winter takes its own share.
What that electricity is worth to you comes from Tarif D, Hydro-Québec's residential rate. It is a two-tier block rate, with the first block of daily consumption billed at 7.065 cents per kilowatt hour as of April 2026 and consumption above the block priced higher. It carries no time-of-use component, so there are no peak hours here and no benefit in shifting appliances to the evening. Solar's value is simply the block rate it displaces, and displacement starts at the expensive end.
Ownership is straightforward for most of the city: 50.1 percent of dwellings are single-detached and another 3.3 percent are semi-detached. 36.8 percent are low-rise units, where the roof is common property or the landlord's, and only 0.4 percent of dwellings sit in high-rises. If you are in the single-detached majority you can go straight to quotes without a co-ownership conversation.
Applying to Hydro-Québec
Hydro-Québec is the distributor here, and a grid-connected system runs under its option d'autoproduction. The installation request is filed by a licensed CMEQ electrician rather than by you or by a general contractor, and Hydro-Québec evaluates whether the local network has capacity to accept your generation before it issues a conditional acceptance.
Self-generation is capped at 1,000 kilowatts, so nothing a house could build approaches the limit. The real gating items are the electrician requirement and the capacity review, and both belong on the schedule before the commissioning date rather than after it. Ask each installer quoting your project who will file, and how many of these they have taken through to acceptance.
It is also worth asking what happens if the capacity review comes back unfavourably for your address, since that is a question about your specific circuit rather than about the province, and the answer determines whether the project proceeds as designed.
Why extra usable space is not a reason to build big
Because the by-law leaves you more usable roof and a workable ground option, it is easy to reason from available area to system size here. The utility side pushes hard in the opposite direction, and it is the side that decides the economics.
Exports are credited one for one, in kilowatt hours, into a surplus bank that offsets later consumption. The bank is then reset to zero every 24 months, on 31 March of each even year. Any balance still sitting there at the reset is settled at Hydro-Québec's average cost of supply, which is well below the retail price you pay to buy the same kilowatt hour back, and the arrangement is written so that it cannot produce a negative bill at any point.
So a kilowatt hour you generate and use is worth the retail rate. A kilowatt hour you generate, bank, and consume before the next reset is worth the same. A kilowatt hour you generate and never consume is worth very little, and on 31 March of an even year it is worth nothing at all. Size the array against the annual consumption on your own bills, not against the roof and yard the by-law makes available. Having more room than you need is a good problem, and the correct response to it is a system that fits your consumption, not one that fills the space.
Grants and financing
Hydro-Québec's LogisVert grant pays $1,000 for every kilowatt of capacity installed, capped at 40 percent of eligible project costs, and Hydro-Québec describes the typical residential outcome as $5,000 to $6,000. Its own projection is that this shortens a typical residential payback from 25 to 30 years to roughly 10 to 12, which is the administrator's modelling of a typical case rather than a figure for your roof.
The conditions are dates rather than judgement calls. The installation has to be completed on or after 30 June 2025, and the application has to be filed through the LogisVert portal within 9 months of the installation date. Because the grant is paid per kilowatt, a system sized to your consumption rather than to your roof also collects a smaller grant, which is a real trade-off and still the right call: a grant on capacity that generates unusable surplus does not make that surplus worth having.
Federal support has narrowed. The Canada Greener Homes Loan, interest free up to $40,000, stopped taking new applications on 2 October 2025 and now only funds loans already approved. The Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program launched in September 2025 in its place, delivering no-cost retrofits through provincial partners to low and median income households, with solar eligible federally but each province setting its own technology list. There is no Canadian residential investment tax credit for solar.