Want to install solar panels on your roof but don't have thousands of dollars hanging around? A recent regulatory change may be just what you're looking for.

On July 1, the Ontario government officially changed the provincial net metering regime to allow consumers to bypass the upfront costs of installing solar panels.

Instead, consumers can enter into a financing agreement with a third party.

The third party would either sell the power generated by the panels back to the consumer for a fixed rate, or the consumer would pay a specific rate for the amount of time they use the panels, as opposed to paying for the power generated. In industry terms, the former is called a power purchase agreement, while the latter is called a solar lease.

The excess power generated would then be fed back into the grid, and consumers would get a credit they can use against their power bills at times of the year when the sun isn't shining as often.

"Is this a good thing? Probably, yes. Is it going to change the world? Probably not," said Mark Winfield, a York University professor heading up the school's Sustainable Energy Initiative.

One reason Winfield said he's lukewarm on the change is it's unlikely to be something many individual households take advantage of.

"The way that net metering rules are set up is the most you can do is generate credit against your utility bill, but you can never be in a position where the utility is actually paying you," he said.

On the individual household level, the third parties probably won't be able to make enough of a profit on the energy generated to justify the upfront cost of installing the panels, he said.

"Is their capital going to be patient enough for that kind of a payback on this very, very small, household-level scale?" he said. "It's not a bad thing at all. It opens up some possibilities, but it's hard to see that you're gonna get that much uptake as a result."

Some individuals still may be inclined to take advantage, said Stephen Thomas, a policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation.

"Folks enjoy having some energy autonomy and having direct interaction with the electricity that they use every day," he said.

Also, "folks who put solar on their own roof, or who will enter into an agreement, are folks who care about climate change and want to do their part. And they're also folks who have the means and who want to save a bit of money on their electricity costs."

On the commercial or institutional level, however, the calculations are a bit different.

"Programs like this have good uptake in places like Nova Scotia and California already. Programs like this are very common in the United States," Thomas said. "It tends to be commercial and industrial uses, folks like universities or municipalities."

"For multi-unit residential buildings it's pretty complicated, because most typically, the units have their own sub-meters. So it's not quite so easy for them to benefit from rooftop solar because they don't have a lot of tenants coming in and out," said Nicholas Gall, Ontario director for the Canadian Renewable Energy Association.

"The majority of uptake for this is going to come from larger commercial and industrial customers where you have a big roof space," Gall said. "You can really optimize the configuration of the panels to make sure that they're producing as much as possible. That really enables some pretty significant economies of scale."

The environmental benefit will depend on how widespread uptake is, but it should have some impact on Ontario's greenhouse gas emissions, Gall said.

"One of the key advantages of solar in Ontario is that it produces the most during summer days when we're using the most electricity," he said. "To meet those peaks we turn on gas power plants."

By potentially filling some of the need for more power during the summer months with solar instead of gas, some emissions will be avoided, he said.

New solar panel policy a solid, but small, step: experts

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