Solar panels in Burnaby, British Columbia

Burnaby, in the heart of Metro Vancouver, produces 980 kWh/kW. BC Hydro rebates and PST exemption apply. Burnaby’s mix of older homes and new development creates opportunities for both retrofit and new-build solar.

BC Hydro offers up to $5,000 for solar and battery rebate of up to $1,500 with solar (no Peak Saver), or up to $5,000 with Peak Saver enrollment. The PST exemption (7%) saves an additional ~$2,000 on equipment.

Note: The federal Canada Greener Homes Grant and Loan programs are now closed.

Until 1 July 2026 a Burnaby homeowner faced a genuine decision: take BC Hydro’s solar rebate, or stay on 1:1 net metering and bank every exported kilowatt-hour at full retail value. That decision no longer exists. Following a BC Utilities Commission ruling, BC Hydro closed the net metering rate (Rate Schedule 1289) to new customers on 1 July 2026.

New systems go on Rate Schedule 2289 instead. BC Hydro buys your excess generation at a fixed 10 cents per kWh, and — a real improvement on the old arrangement — pays you every billing cycle rather than banking credits until a yearly reconciliation. Because retail electricity in Burnaby costs more than 10 cents, a kilowatt-hour you use yourself is now worth more than one you export. That makes the shape of your daily consumption matter in a way it did not before: running the dishwasher at noon rather than at midnight is now worth something.

Take the rebate. Declining it no longer preserves 1:1 net metering, because that rate is closed to new customers regardless. BC Hydro’s own position is that the solar rebate is expected to fully offset the impact of the rate change for an average residential customer. One distinction worth knowing: if you accept only the battery rebate and no solar rebate, your service rate is unaffected. BC Hydro also does not permit a pro-rated or combined arrangement across the two rates — it is one or the other.

Most of these pages can go straight to sunshine and payback. Burnaby needs a step before that, because a large share of the city lives in buildings where rooftop solar is not a decision an individual resident can make.

Metrotown, Brentwood and Lougheed are town centres built around apartment towers. If you live in one, the roof belongs to the strata, not to you — and a strata rooftop array is a collective decision involving the council, a depreciation report and usually a specialist consultant, rather than something an owner arranges. It is not impossible, and larger stratas do it, but it is a different and slower process than a homeowner faces.

Capitol Hill, Deer Lake and South Burnaby are a different proposition. Detached and semi-detached housing with owned roofs is exactly the case residential solar is designed around, and at 980 kWh per kW a year with a payback of 11 to 14 years, the economics here are ordinary for the Lower Mainland rather than exceptional in either direction.

Townhouses sit in between and are worth asking about specifically. Some strata agreements assign the roof above a unit to that unit; many do not. The answer is in your strata documents rather than in anything an installer can tell you, and it is worth checking before you spend time on quotes.

If you do own the roof, the rest of this page applies as written. If you do not, the honest answer is that your route to solar runs through your strata council rather than through us.

Until the middle of 2026 the answer to “should I add a battery?” in British Columbia was usually no, and the reason was net metering. Under the 1:1 rate the grid acted as a free, lossless, unlimited battery: every exported kilowatt-hour banked at full retail value and came back at full retail value. Buying a physical battery to do the same job made little sense.

That changed on 1 July 2026, when BC Hydro closed Rate Schedule 1289 to new customers following a BC Utilities Commission decision. New self-generation customers take Rate Schedule 2289, under which exports are bought at a fixed 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, paid each billing cycle. Meanwhile Burnaby buys electricity back at 11.87 cents on Step 1 and 14.08 on Step 2.

So every kilowatt-hour you can store and use yourself instead of exporting is now worth the difference between those numbers — up to about 4 cents on Step 2. That is the arithmetic, and it is genuinely different from last year’s.

What it does not settle is whether a battery pays for itself, because that depends on your installed cost and on how much surplus you actually generate, and neither is a number we can guess for you. The right approach is to ask for the projection both ways — with and without storage — and to see the assumed surplus written down rather than described.

There is also a free version of the same idea. Shifting laundry, dishwashing, pool pumps and car charging into daylight hours captures part of the same gap at no capital cost, and it is worth doing regardless of what you decide about a battery.

• View Solar Panel Pricing →
• Check Available Rebates →
• British Columbia Solar Overview →