How Much Does Solar Cost? More Affordable Than Most People Think

Solar costs have been on a steady, dramatic decline for well over a decade, and that trend hasn't slowed down. Between 2010 and 2019 alone, the cost of utility scale solar power fell by 82%, one of the fastest cost declines of any electricity generation technology in history. Residential systems saw a smaller but still substantial drop over the same period, somewhere between 47% and 80% depending on the local market, smaller than utility scale purely because residential installations are inherently smaller and don't benefit from the same economies of scale.

Most of this improvement comes down to steady gains in manufacturing efficiency. Modern panels convert more sunlight into electricity per square metre than older generations did, which means a given rooftop can now produce more power for essentially the same installation cost, or the same power for a smaller, cheaper system. Layer provincial and federal incentive programs on top of that baseline cost decline, and the net result is that solar today is more within financial reach than it has ever been, even as those specific incentive programs continue to shift and evolve over time.

Even with all of that progress, there's still a real affordability gap for many building owners: the upfront capital cost of a system, even a smaller one, remains out of reach for plenty of households and organizations, especially non-profits, community groups, and older buildings without spare capital budgets. This is precisely the gap BVGEC exists to close. Rather than asking a single building owner to shoulder the full upfront cost of a system, we pool investment from our broader community of members and investors, cover the installation cost ourselves, and recover that investment over time through a long term power purchase agreement with the host site. The result is that hosts like Ralph Connor Memorial United Church, a congregation that never could have self-funded an 11.25 kW solar array on its own, get access to clean, often cheaper energy without ever needing to front the capital themselves.