A clean-energy briefing on solar in Drayton Valley.

Short answer: yes, and Drayton Valley's climate helps more than people expect. Central Alberta lands around 2,300 hours of sunshine a year, and our winters are an asset, not a liability — panels are electronics, and they run more efficiently in the cold. The snow that worries people sheds off a pitched array quickly, and the long bright days from March through September do the heavy lifting.

A typical home here ends up on a 7 to 8 kW system, which runs roughly $19,600 to $22,400 before incentives at our ~$2.80/W cash rate. Smaller 3–6 kW arrays cost a bit more per watt, because the fixed costs of a crew, permits and racking spread over fewer panels. We design to your actual power bills, not a brochure number, so the system is sized to wipe out your usage and not a kilowatt more.

Every install uses LONGi 500W panels with APsystems DS3 microinverters — panel-level electronics that keep one shaded module from dragging down the rest of the roof. We add a critter guard around the array and back the work with a lifetime leak-proof roof guarantee. The crew is in-house, supervised by a Master Electrician, and we've done 500+ installs across Alberta since 2018. Want the winter detail? Here's how solar handles Alberta winters.

This is the one detail people get wrong about Drayton Valley, so it's worth being precise. The poles, wires and meter inside town are owned and maintained by the Drayton Valley REA (Rural Electrification Association) — a member-owned electricity co-operative, not FortisAlberta and not ATCO. When you go solar, your micro-generation application and your bi-directional meter swap go through the REA. Both the paperwork and the permit are ours to handle, not yours.

As for who sells you the energy, Alberta runs a deregulated retail market. The REA's regulated, default energy rate is currently provided by EPCOR Energy Alberta, but you're free to choose any competitive retailer you like — switching retailers doesn't change how your solar works.

Net metering itself runs under Alberta's Micro-Generation Regulation: the power you export to the grid earns you retail-rate credits, which bank up in summer and draw down in winter. It's the same provincial framework whether your distributor is a big utility or a local co-op like the REA. If you want the mechanics, we wrote them up here: how net metering works in Alberta →

Drayton Valley sits on Highway 22 in the North Saskatchewan River valley, about 133 km — roughly an hour and a half — southwest of our Edmonton shop. It grew up on the Pembina oilfield, and that oil-and-gas heritage still runs deep. But this is also the town that built the Bio-Mile and the Clean Energy Technology Centre, a bio-industrial research park that was the first of its kind in Alberta. People here already understand energy — which tends to make the conversation about rooftop solar a short and practical one.

We install across the town core and the newer streets, and out onto the Brazeau County acreages and river-valley properties where there's room for a ground-mount array instead of a roof. The drive is longer for us than a job in the city, and we'll say so plainly — but it changes nothing on your invoice. No travel surcharge: same crew, same pricing as Edmonton.