A BRIGHT IDEA Shedding Light on Your Home's Solar Potential

from Saskatoon HOME magazine Summer 2023

After After

Last fall, Drew Sebesteny installed nine solar panels on his home in Dundonald. “I’ve always been interested in having solar panels,” he says. “I think everybody, at some point, is going to end up with solar panels on their house—it just seems to be the smart thing to do.”

Two programs helped him harness his home’s solar potential: the Canada Greener Homes Grant, and the City of Saskatoon’s Home Energy Loan Program (HELP) program, the latter of which not currently accepting applications.

Drew says the payback period for his panels is about 20 years. “It’s quite a ways out, but for me, it’s also knowing that I’m using a more renewable source of energy. Even if I am not paying for them super fast, at least I can feel a little bit better about not using non-renewable resources.”

He says that although the past winter seemed to have more cloud cover

BY: JULIE BARNES

than usual, he’s excited to see how much energy his panels generate this spring and summer.

Energy Made Visible

A new mapping tool called MyHEAT Solar, launched by the City of Saskatoon, will help take some of the guesswork out of the process for residents who are curious about their home’s solar potential.

MyHEAT, a Calgarybased company, partnered with Google to build the residential solar map, says James Henry, director of growth and sustainability at MyHEAT.

“The maps that MyHEAT builds today are all built in partnership with Google, accessing rooftop data and solar potential data for those rooftops, directly from Google,” says James. “What MyHEAT builds on top of that is the entire web interface and platform that builds the customized financial and environmental calculator.”

Saskatoon homeowners simply plug their address into the site, which then populates data on their home’s total hours of annual, usable sunlight and how many square metres of rooftop are available for panels (based off 3D modelling of your home and shading from nearby trees).

After selecting your home’s energy provider (Saskatoon Light & Power or SaskPower), and entering your average monthly electricity bill, the site suggests how many solar panels you should install, based on your monthly electricity usage and the size of your roof.

MyHEAT Solar shares your estimated upfront costs, the number of years it should take to pay it off, total savings after 25 years and the environmental benefits: how many tonnes of carbon dioxide saved, and how that translates to a specific number of trees grown for ten years or cars taken off the road.

The site also directs users to a list of qualified solar contractors in the city, and provides a link to the Canada Greener Homes Initiative, so homeowners can find out of they are eligible for a grant.

Significant Solar Potential

James says there are about 60,000 viable rooftops in Saskatoon “that are suitable for solar, based on their size and orientation.” That’s about 77 per cent of the rooftops in the mapped data set.

“If you look at a solar irradiance map, parts of Saskatchewan and Alberta are much better for solar potential just based on the sun’s path and exposure, and also cloud cover and weather patterns—it’s much better than places like B.C., Halifax and southern Ontario,” says James.

If each of those 60,000 rooftops were to add an average-sized solar system, the city could harness just over 1 million megawatt hours per year, says James. “That’s a pretty abstract number to digest, but it’s equivalent to roughly taking a million cars off the road or planting 76 million trees that are grown for 10 years. And it’s equivalent to 4.6 million tonnes of (saved) CO2 emissions.”

The map doesn’t always account for the rooftop area on detached garages. “Whether or not a building is mapped with solar potential, is down to whether Google has been able to identify that as a structure and do the processing on it,” says James. In that case, there’s a calculator for homeowners to enter the total area of their garage roof and the direction it faces, in order to get a complete picture of the solar potential for their home.

Although commercial and industrial buildings show up on the MyHEAT Solar map, it’s designed for residential use, says James. The hours of usable sunlight will likely be accurate for these buildings, but, due to differences in electricity rates and solar installation costs, owners of commercial properties should consult a qualified solar installer for a detailed assessment.

Taking the Next Step

The solar mapping tool is considered a first step. Homeowners interested in adding a solar panel system should contact local providers for a more detailed assessment and estimate.

After Drew Sebesteny plugged his address into the site, it calculated that his roof receives 1,524 hours of usable sunlight per year, and that his system should save 128 tonnes of carbon dioxide over its lifespan, which is equivalent to over 2,100 trees grown for 10 years, and about 28 cars taken off the road.

“My findings from the site definitely support what I found out during the installation process,” he says. “All the information you need is in one place and it’s all tailored to my home. It might not entirely make the decision for me, but would give me the confidence to reach out to a solar company and get the ball rolling. It also helps turn all of the guesses and assumptions I had about solar for my home into something much more concrete and actionable.”

Julie Barnes

Interested in seeing your home’s solar potential? Visit: solar.myheat.ca/saskatoon