The federal programmes are closed
Start here, because a great deal of solar marketing has not caught up. Natural Resources Canada lists the Canada Greener Homes Grant as closed, and states that 31 December 2025 was the last day to submit documents. The Canada Greener Homes Loan is also listed as closed, with the wording that no further applications can be approved, though applications already approved are unaffected.
The Canada Greener Homes Grant page itself now carries only the line that the programme is closed and that it is transitioning to Environment and Climate Change Canada. There is no successor federal grant for residential solar photovoltaic as of September 2026.
What is still open federally is the Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program, and it is a different thing: it targets low-to-median-income homeowners and tenants and covers energy efficiency retrofits to reduce monthly energy bills. It is not a solar panel grant. The separate Oil to Heat Pump Affordability Program is listed as closing, with 31 July 2026 having been the last day to apply in the provinces where it was still running, and Ontario was not among them.
The practical instruction is short. If a quote in 2026 shows a federal grant line against a solar system, that quote is wrong, and it is worth asking what else on it has not been checked.
What Ontario offers, and the exact rates
The live programme is Home Renovation Savings, delivered by Save on Energy and Enbridge Gas with the Government of Ontario's support and administered by the IESO. For solar and storage it offers up to $5,000 for solar panels at $1,000 per kilowatt and up to 50 per cent of total costs, and up to $5,000 for battery energy storage at $300 per kilowatt hour on the same 50 per cent cap.
Because the solar rate is $1,000 per kilowatt with a $5,000 ceiling, the rebate maxes out at 5 kilowatts. A 10 kilowatt array receives the same $5,000 as a 5 kilowatt one. The 50 per cent cap also binds on very small systems: a $6,000 installation gets $3,000 rather than the per-kilowatt figure.
Eligibility is straightforward. You must be at least 18, own a single detached, semi-detached, row house, townhome or mobile home on a permanent foundation, be connected to the Ontario electricity grid, and be the person responsible for paying for the purchase and installation. Where an owner has tenants, the owner applies.
The condition that matters more than the money
Read this part twice. The programme's own solar page states that participants who receive an incentive through Home Renovation Savings for solar PV and battery storage projects are not eligible to participate in a net metering agreement with their local distribution company. Its reasoning is that these incentives are provided for projects designed for load displacement only, meaning the electricity generated is used exclusively to meet the home's own consumption.
The participant agreement is firmer still: if you receive a rebate you must not enter into a net metering agreement at any time in connection with the measures installed, and if you do, you must repay the full amount of the rebate to the IESO within 30 days.
So the choice is binary and it is yours to make before the system is designed. The rebate route suits a household that uses a lot of daytime electricity and can consume most of what the array makes. The net metering route suits a household that wants to build credits against winter consumption and expects to export a meaningful share in summer.
A useful rule of thumb: the rebate is worth at most $5,000 on the panels. If net metering would let you usefully deploy an array two or three times larger than a load-displacement design justifies, the foregone rebate may be the smaller number. Ask your installer to model both cases with your own consumption data and show you the two twenty-year totals side by side. If they will not, that tells you something.
What the net metering side is actually worth
Two constraints from the Ontario Energy Board shape it. Credits can only be used to offset charges related to your electricity consumption, the kilowatt hours you used, and cannot be applied to other types of charges on the bill. And credits can only be carried over to future bills for up to 12 months, after which they are reduced to zero. Hydro Ottawa says the same in its own terms, adding that the credit cannot be redeemed for cash.
Those two rules together mean an oversized array does not bank value indefinitely. It generates credits that expire. Size to annual consumption.
For what a kilowatt hour is worth: under the Regulated Price Plan prices effective 1 November 2025, time-of-use is 9.8 cents off-peak, 15.7 mid-peak and 20.3 on-peak, and the tiered option is 12.0 cents for the first block and 14.2 above it, with the residential threshold at 1,000 kilowatt hours a month in winter and 600 in summer. Solar produces in the middle of the day, so a blended value in the low to middle teens of cents is a fair planning assumption for Ottawa.
What we could not verify
Being straight about the gaps. There is no published end date for the Home Renovation Savings programme on either the programme site or the Save on Energy page, and the participant agreement does not state a term either, so nobody should tell you how long the rebate will last. Confirm it is still open on the day you apply.
No public authority publishes installed solar pricing for Ottawa, so every dollar per watt figure on this site is an indicative market range rather than a sourced number.
Natural Resources Canada publishes a mapping application giving photovoltaic potential in kilowatt hours per kilowatt peak anywhere in Canada on a roughly 2 kilometre grid using a 0.75 performance ratio, but the figures live inside the interactive tool and we could not read Ottawa's value directly. The Canada Energy Regulator's comparison of city solar potential does put Ottawa at 6.09 kilowatt hours per square metre, ahead of Toronto at 5.94, on a dual-axis tracking basis. Treat any annual production figure in a quote as the installer's modelled claim, and ask which software produced it and what snow loss it assumed.
Sources
- Natural Resources Canada, Canada Greener Homes Initiative (programme statuses)
- Natural Resources Canada, Closed: Canada Greener Homes Grant
- Home Renovation Savings, solar panels and battery storage
- Home Renovation Savings, Solar and Storage Participant Agreement
- Ontario Energy Board, Net metering
- Ontario Energy Board, Electricity rates
- Canada Energy Regulator, city solar potential
- Natural Resources Canada, photovoltaic potential maps