Ontario refunds the provincial sales tax on solar photovoltaic, or PV, equipment and under its standard offer program will pay 42 cents per kilowatt-hour if you want to feed your home-generated solar power into the grid.

These incentives help, especially if you consider the rate of return of investing $20,000 in a two-kilowatt solar PV system is equal to or slightly better than putting the same amount of money into a GIC.

Still, most people like to talk payback and it would typically take more than 20 years for a two-kilowatt system to pay for itself. For this reason, the only "economical" solar projects in Ontario are multi-megawatt solar farms that benefit from economies of scale.

Over the next two years, however, things could become quite interesting. There are high hopes that the Ministry of Energy will soon expand province-wide a zero-interest solar loan program currently offered in Peel Region.