People who like green energy are seeing red over a plan in New Brunswick to charge solar panel users much more for electricity.
NB Power has put in an application with the provincial regulator that would change the rules for people with solar systems.
Existing customers would be grandfathered under the old scheme for 10 years, but people who don’t sign up before this November won’t get as good a deal.
Solar NB, a non-profit solar association, has condemned the public utility’s shift, arguing it will kill any momentum toward a cheaper, more environmentally friendly form of electricity.
It is demanding that NB Power hold public consultations before making any changes.
“There’s a sense of urgency here,” said Chris Meechan, a board member who heads the solar division at Greenfoot Energy Solutions, a company founded in New Brunswick that sells solar systems in five provinces.
“There’s been no consultation, and NB Power is making uninformed decisions, doing it in a huge rush. People haven’t had a voice to communicate their concerns and talk about their experiences.”
But NB Power says it has no choice but to make changes because most of its 430,000 customers are subsidizing the cost of the 826 solar users, whose numbers are small but rapidly growing thanks to the increasing price of electricity.
The public utility wants to change its long-standing practice of giving people with solar panels the same amount of credit for electricity they produce through its net metering system. Instead, the credit would be worth less than half of what those solar customers would normally get.
This is important to solar users because when the sun doesn’t shine, they must pay for the electricity they draw from NB Power’s grid. On sunny days, any excess electricity produced by the solar panels is dumped back into NB Power’s system for others to use.
On top of changing the straight one-to-one credit, the public utility wants to add a special demand charge that would see solar users pay a large amount if they use electricity during peak demand, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. during weekdays, instead of using a backup battery.
Evidence filed to the New Brunswick Energy and Utilities Board late last month shows that NB Power expects the average solar user’s monthly bill to rise considerably.
Solar users who are grandfathered can expect to pay about $156 a month for electricity, whereas people with solar under the new regime would pay about $247 a month.
That means new solar users over a year would pay on average $1,092 more.
Brad Coady, an NB Power senior executive, told Brunswick News on Thursday that the changes were a long time coming.
For about 20 years, he said, solar users have benefited from incentives, either provided by Ottawa or NB Power. Those incentives will end as of May 27.
On top of that, the regulator has ordered NB Power to stop cross-subsidization, insisting that every customer pay their own way.
Coady said when NB Power first started offering net metering two decades ago, solar panels were very expensive, and the utility was trying to encourage people to adopt the technology.
Now that prices for panels have plunged, customers no longer need as much financial help, he insisted.
“We have now exceeded the goals that the original program has been designed to handle,” the executive said.
“Folks who are investing in these solar systems have the financial wherewithal to do it, aren’t paying their fair share for the cost of service to them, and the rest of the system is subsidizing their activities. So, if a customer, for all the good reasons in the world, said, ‘hey, I could run this system and lower my bill,’ the costs to the utility don’t go away and we end up raising rates unfairly on everyone else.”
To that end, Coady said solar panel users, who generally have more money to install such systems (they often cost thousands of dollars) and understand better than most people when to harvest energy and use backup batteries, should be able to figure out how to avoid the punishing demand charge.
But Meechan pointed out that uptake for solar in New Brunswick is already among the weakest of any province. He generally tells customers it takes three to 10 years for an expensive solar system to pay off in electricity savings. That financial payback has now been thrown out of whack.
Any momentum in recent years because NB Power jacked its electrical rates could be stopped dead in its tracks, he warned.
“If you look at what’s happened in New Brunswick over the last few years, the cost of electricity has almost doubled,” the solar panel savant said. “The electrification of everything is happening right now with heating and cooling of buildings, and transportation but the economic benefits of solar haven’t been weighed in.
“Here we have people privately investing in energy infrastructure, which helps everybody. That’s not being taken into consideration.”
Coady pushed back. While the executive said he could understand the association’s displeasure, he pointed out that surveys of most of NB Power’s customers show they overwhelmingly care about pricing and reliability, with green energy nowhere near the top of the list.
By John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 26, 2026 at 08:16
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