If you’ve talked to a few solar companies, you’ve probably heard some version of “never pay a hydro bill again.” It’s a great sales line. It’s just not quite the full picture.

Here’s the honest answer to whether you can eliminate your electricity bill with solar: no, not all the way to $0 in Ontario, and any installer who promises that isn’t giving you the whole story. What it can do is get you very close, often 70-100% of the way there. The gap between “close” and “zero” comes down to a few specific things worth understanding before you sign anything.

Why you can’t actually get to zero

Even a perfectly sized solar system with net metering still leaves you with a fixed monthly grid connection charge, usually somewhere in the $30-60 range. This charge applies whether your home produces net-zero energy or not, simply because you’re still connected to the grid. Going fully off-grid is a completely different, far more expensive undertaking than typical residential solar, and it’s not what most homeowners are actually looking for.

So the realistic goal isn’t “eliminate the bill.” It’s “eliminate almost all of the usage portion of the bill.” That’s a genuinely great outcome, it’s just not the same as zero.

The decision most homeowners don’t know they’re making

This is the part that actually matters most, and it’s rarely explained clearly: in Ontario, you generally have to choose between two paths, and you can’t do both.

Path one: the Home Renovation Savings rebate. This offers up to $5,000 for solar panels and another $5,000 for battery storage. The catch is that it requires “load displacement,” meaning your system is designed for zero export, sized only to cover what you personally use.

Path two: Net metering. This lets you export surplus solar power to the grid and get credited at the full retail rate for it, which can be worth more over the system’s lifetime if you’re generating a genuine surplus. The trade-off is you give up the rebate entirely.

For homes that would export a lot of extra power, net metering’s lifetime credit value can beat the one-time $5,000 rebate by a wide margin. For homes that mostly use their own solar as they produce it, the rebate path often comes out ahead instead. This isn’t a small detail. It’s the single biggest factor in what your actual outcome looks like, and it’s worth having a real conversation about before deciding which way to go.

One more thing worth knowing if you do go the net metering route: unused credits expire after 12 months in Ontario. You can’t bank them forever, so oversizing your system thinking you’ll stockpile years of credit doesn’t actually work that way.

Does a battery actually help?

Yes, more than people expect. Exported power under net metering only gets credited at the wholesale rate, roughly 7-9 cents per kWh, while using your own stored power instead of buying from the grid saves you the full retail rate, up to about 20 cents per kWh during peak hours. Solar naturally produces the most power between 10am and 3pm, but most homes use the most electricity in the early morning and evening, exactly when the sun isn’t cooperating. A battery captures that midday surplus and shifts it to cover the evening peak instead of losing most of its value to a low export credit. In practice, this can meaningfully increase how much of your own bill you’re actually offsetting, often somewhere in the 25-40% range on top of solar alone.

What actually determines how close you get to “eliminated”

A few real factors decide this, more than any marketing number does:

System size relative to your actual usage. This should be based on a full year of your real hydro bills, not a rough guess, since usage swings a lot across Ontario’s seasons.

Roof orientation and shading. South-facing, unshaded roofs produce meaningfully more. A shaded or north-facing roof will cap how close you can realistically get, no matter the budget, and that’s worth knowing upfront rather than after installation.

Winter reality. Production drops significantly from November through February with Ontario’s shorter days and lower sun angle. Net metering’s summer-to-winter credit rollover is built to smooth this out. Without net metering, on the zero-export rebate path, winter months will likely mean pulling more from the grid again, which is a fair expectation to set going in.

So what’s a realistic number?

There’s no single universal percentage, because it depends on your specific system size, roof, and which program path you choose. What’s fair to say honestly: a well-designed system commonly offsets the large majority of annual usage, often somewhere in the 70-100% range. Anyone quoting you an exact percentage before reviewing your actual bills and roof isn’t really answering the question, they’re guessing.

The honest bottom line

If your goal is to eliminate your electricity bill with solar entirely, the honest answer is you’ll get close, but not all the way, and for a lot of homeowners it comes close enough to “eliminated” that the fixed grid charge is the only line left on the bill. But “eliminate” is a marketing word, not a technical one. The real answer depends on choices, net metering versus the rebate, system size, whether to add a battery, that a good installer should walk you through honestly, trade-offs included, instead of just promising zero.

If you want to know what your actual numbers would look like, get your free savings report and we’ll walk through your real usage, your roof, and which path actually makes sense for your home.