A Cortes Island based solar company has been installing more systems that tie into the grid. 

There is a lot of potential for solar energy production in British Columbia. It has been largely untouched because of the province’s reliance on hydro-power and natural gas. As of October 2023, BC Hydro had 8,500 net metering customers with a combined solar capacity of 71 MW. This was only a fraction of the 4,609.5 MW of solar capacity tied to Canada’s grid that year. 

These statistics do not include off-grid installations.  

“The majority of my customers are off-grid. Anytime you’re using fuel, switching to solar is a ‘no brainer.’ The payback is extremely quick. You don’t have the noise of the generator and  it generator is not very efficient either,” explained Ian King of Cortes Island based King Solar Contracting.

He cited a recent $60,000 installation on Twin Islands. Prior to this, his customer had been burning through $40,000 worth of diesel every year. The system should pay for itself, through reduced energy costs, in a year and a half. 

King: “The bulk of my customers are on Hernando Island. I’ve put in about 95% of the systems there. There’s quite a few installers on Savary Island, but I’ve done a few out that way. I had quite a few up in Granite Bay before BC Hydro reached the north end of Quadra. Refuge is another little cove of no power. There’s the two fingers around the Gorge, and that’s generally where there’s no hydro.” 

He proceeded to list some small islands around Cortes: Channel Rock. Whale Rock, Heather Islet and Coulter Island.

King has put in more than 200 systems during the past 20 years. While the majority appear to be in our vicinity, he has worked on some of the remote islands around Port McNeill, and as far south as Mill Bay, or across the waters to the Lund – Powell River area.

Cortes Currents was especially interested in some of the grid tied systems King Solar recently installed on Cortes Island. The ‘pay back’ is slower, often about 20 years, but this really depends on the complexity of the system required.

Sadhu Johnston and Manda Aufochs Gillespie had two solar systems installed on their property a couple of years ago. They have a complex system with battery storage for their house, and a more simple system for their shop and a rental unit on their property.

Johnston: “Our system up the hill doesn’t have the separate inverter and battery system, so that system was a lot less expensive to install. We don’t get the benefit of power during an outage and whatnot, but we still get the benefit of reducing our consumption because we’re generating power and putting it into the grid. So that system up the hill will have a much faster payback – because it’s really just the solar panels.” 

King: “I like to sit down with each individual customer and keep an eye on their bills, to better educate myself on exactly what the real time numbers are per each system.” 

Johnston: “It’s really great to have somebody in our community that knows my panel system and can come and give me technical advice and help me out versus hiring someone from afar that comes in and does your installation, disappears and it’s really hard to reach them.”

“I call him once every few months with a question. Wondering what this light means, or can you come over and look at something or there’s a noise or whatever. It makes a really big difference to be able to know that  if I need him within an hour, he’s over taking a look at something and he’s not sending me a bill every time. He’s a neighbour and he feels pride in his work. He wants to make sure that I understand things and can maintain it properly ourselves.”

King: “It’s a big selling feature for me, even on Hernando per se, that I am local. Word of mouth is an enormous part of how my business expands and I get new jobs.” 

Johnston: “At first I was really intent on monitoring our solar all the time.  In the height of summer, I’ve been really trying to understand which trees are shading it because right at peak production time, there was a valley in our production. So there’s one or two trees that are clearly having an impact. I might focus a little bit more here and there on trying to understand what’s happening, but generally speaking, I’m not watching it on a daily basis anymore.” 

King: “That’s a normal trait. It’s important for any customer to understand the system. I encourage people to ask me questions so they’ll better understand and it is a wide range of people with their gifts and their weaknesses as far as how they understand things.”

“If you’re going to have a problem, it generally happens within the first couple of weeks. The more you get the curiosity of it over with, the more you’re comfortable and understand the character of how that system is going to behave.” 

Cortes Currents: What kind of problems do you get in those first couple of weeks? 

King: “It’s generally minor programming issues, and primarily off grid. The battery is basically your grid.  Generally it’s things like calibrating  battery percentage metres because every battery is going to behave a little bit different towards the charge and discharge.”

Mike Moore and Kate Maddigan had their system installed in March: 

Moore: “When Ian King from King Solar sized up our needs, he said that 4,000 watts was approximately half of what we would require on an annual basis. What we need is a 9,000 watt system, but we decided to just go with 4,000 watts and invest in the grid tie and battery systems, which is where the major investment is. When we find the money, we can buy the additional solar panels, microinverters and minimal wiring and racking. We can double the size of our system quite cheaply,” he explained.

“Kate and I had been discussing getting a solar array for quite some time.  She was very enthusiastic about it and I was not so enthusiastic because I’ve had other solar systems on my previous house and on my boats. Having an alternative energy supply when you’ve already got hydro seemed just really costly.” 

“Then we got talking more and more about energy security and the fact that we are reliant on water that is a hundred feet down in the ground. We are reliant on our deep well and as wildfire consciousness approached and the idea of putting sprinklers on the house came into being, I realized  the only way to have that kind of fire protection is to have energy security so that at any time you can get the water out of the ground. Even in a post major storm event, something that takes down the power lines, if you’ve got a garden in the summertime you need to get that water out of the ground. That was the thing that changed my mind.” 

“Then afterwards other things fell into place, like just considering the size of the electrical wire that comes from the Malaspina Peninsula on the mainland and feeds Cortes. It’s a finite size and we’re building more on Cortes, We have more electrical loads, we’re putting more and more strain on that wire. Some people say that we experience voltage drops at times of high load.  Producing power locally just seems to really help offset that. When we sell back power into the grid. It helps offset Cortes Island’s usage. That was an extremely attractive idea to me as well.”

“There’s no point in putting in big mega project hydroelectric dams and generators  if we have to keep opening up the earth and digging out more copper  to make huge transmission lines  and clear cut swaths of forest to lay those transmission lines over,  when we can just relieve the pressure on some of the systems that are already here.” 

After only two months of usage, Mike Moore does not have sufficient data to see the total impact.

Moore: “Our maximum output in a day so far has been about 21.5 kilowatt hours (kWh). With our heat pumps running,  we have two freezers, two fridges, electric stove, electric kettle, electric hot water tank. On average, when it’s not really cold, our house uses approximately  30 – 32 kWh in a day. So even at maximum potential, at the moment we are not producing enough for our entire needs.” 

Sadhu Johnston has two years of data. In 2021, the year prior to installing solar, his hydro bill for the main house was $4,163.

Johnston: “The following year, after the solar installation, we spent $2,400. So in that system, we saved $1,700.”

Also, the electricity bill for his shop dropped $500. 

Johnston: “So over a year, we saved $2,200 on our energy.” 

He emailed a chart that displayed the changes in their BC Hydro bills between June 2021 and May 2024.

Johnston estimates that prior to installing solar, he was experiencing grid failure for about two weeks a year. 

“My wife and I both work from home and so extended power outages are really challenging for us. We  felt that being more resilient on our own property, being able to charge our devices and continue working through power outages was an important part of being able to continue working. That  required us to do the inverter and the battery system, which we’ve done in our main house here.”

They had other reasons to switch to solar. 

Johnston: “Really just to take advantage of the sun to produce our power.”  

“The third reason is that we were often going into the tier two pricing on our BC hydro accounts. As soon as you use a certain amount, you go into the tier two pricing, which is not double but is a lot more. So if you can offset the amount of energy you’re using, you end up saving a lot of money because you’re not going into the tier two pricing as early in the billing cycle.” 

And there was a financial reason. With Site C coming online, that’s going to need to be paid for and the consumers are going to be paying for that. I would expect that BC Hydro  rates will continue to go up in the decades ahead. So we’re hedging our bets that as that goes up, we’ll be able to produce our own power and that will end up saving us money over time.” 

Cortes Currents: How is solar working out for you economically right now?  

Johnston: “It’s great. It’s really nice to see on nice summer days when the sun’s out that our meter is turning backward and we’re feeding power back into the grid.”

“Overall, we made an investment that will take years to pay back.  But it felt like the right decision to invest our resources. You can invest them in the stock market, or you can invest them in solar panels on your house and a physical asset that is having a positive environmental impact, making us more resilient. Investing in the future felt like the right thing to do.”

Moore: “At the moment, on a sunny day we are selling back to the grid at approximately 5 kWh per day.”

Cortes Currents: Ian King advised you to get a 9,000 watt solar array. If you had done that would you have been able to go 100 percent solar?  

Moore: “No, because we are essentially using hydro as a battery. With our battery bank, we don’t have enough capacity to run things like heat pumps, electric ranges. You don’t want to be putting those things through inverters, they are massive draws. We are just using the battery bank for emergencies,  for the lower draw things that we need day to day that make our life a little easier, like lighting during a blackout, like being able to keep the cell phones and computers charged up, internet, freezers. fridge sand water pump going.” 

Cortes Currents: How much maintenance do you have to do on the system?  

King: “For the panels, it’s just keeping them clean. The pollen that we receive in the spring can be a major nuisance. Luca goes around and cleans windows and skylights. It’s quite common for him to get on the roof and clean them every spring.”

“Otherwise, there’s no oil changes with solar panels. When we get to the batteries, they should be checked monthly for water levels and also just for corrosion on the battery terminals.”    

Cortes Currents: How much time is involved in lookingafter your panels? Could Sadhu and Manda go away for a month?  

King: “Oh yes, there’s nothing to check really.You can see what’s going on on this phone if there’s an issue.”

Cortes Currents: Does it alert you if something’s wrong?

King: “Yes, you can set up what kind of alerts that you want to receive. Whether it be per panel or per system, you can customize exactly what your seeing. Also I have the ability to remotely look into systems and troubleshoot remotely. I can look into complete histories and exactly what the fault is before getting on site.” 

Most of the power outages on Cortes Island appear to be caused by trees falling on the lines. 

King only remembered one tree falling onto a roof installation and the panels actually cushioned the roof, minimizing the damage.  

He lives off the grid. So King often does not know when there is a power outage in the wider community until someone tells him.

Cortes Currents: How important is solar to you? 

King: “It is so important to me! On a personal level, it’s my house. That’s the main thing, as far as living off grid. It’s an important part of my daily independence and production.” 

Cortes Currents: Do you find you wake up in the middle of the night with solar questions on your mind? 

King: “Installation challenges are always the thing that I think about as I’m falling asleep at night. I’ve got to play with the weather. Most of it’s on rooftops, so it can really be a hair puller,to get jobs done on time. A couple of years ago we had downpours all of June, so I had over 200 solar panels I didn’t install that month.There was a cutoff date for the contractors, they were not allowed to work past the beginning of July – on Hernando in particular. It was very stressful to complete all those projects  within a month. It’s an extremely challenging business as far as with all the different factors that you’re playing with:  delivery dates, owners, weather, water access.”  

Cortes Currents: What about working on a metal roof or an asphalt roof? 

King: “Asphalt roofs are really easy, you can work in any weather that you want. If it’s actually a brand new metal roof, you can walk on it in the rain. If there are any sort of impurities, that is where it becomes slippery. It’s the slope of the roof too. If it’s 45 degree slope, three stories up, the job is a lot slower.”

“If you’re doing a single story and it’s a shallow slope, you’re not so reliant on your harness. There’s a varying degree of challenges but my body’s starting to feel it. My knees are starting to go. I’ve got to watch myself and try to get some younger blood involved.”  

Cortes Currents: Do you work with big ladders?  

King: “I’ve been using a lot of scaffolding. I find it a lot safer. You’ve got that security right at the bottom of the slope. Stepping off a ladder while you’re carrying a 80 pound panel, there’s just no room for error.  It’s way too risky, so I tend to steer clear of ladders. There’s even cases, say a standing seam roof, where you can use welding clamps, or just clamp them onto the seams, and you can put a block of wood in so you can use the roof as a ladder. Once you get the racking on, the racking becomes a ladder and the last step is to install the panels. Once you get the pattern down, it’s not so bad.” 

Cortes Currents: How many installs do you do in a typical month? 

King: “The winters are generally slow. This year was a crazy busy winter, which is really peculiar for me. Normally it’s like the tumbleweeds are going past in the winter and then in May or June everybody gets a solar itch and the calls come in.” 

“If it was a new install, probably on average one a month. Once again, we’ve got a large varying size of systems. There’s a fair amount of upgrades and replacement of things like batteries and inverters. I’ve been doing it for so long, technology is just outdated.”

The world’s first terrestrial solar company was launched in 1973. Some of the oldest solar panels are still operational, albeit at a much reduced capacity.

King: “They’re delaminating  and getting discoloured, but they still produce something. If you look at today’s warranty, it’s warrantied for the power output. You’ll see it gradually drop after 25 years, which is now the industry standard. It’s not like they just drop to nothing after that warranty hits.”

To achieve net zero emissions by 2050, Canada’s Energy Regulator suggests we will need 20,000 MW of installed solar capacity. That’s four times the capacity that we possess today. 

Ian King said he is already seeing an increase in the number of solar installations tied to the grid:  

“The price of panels is dropping and the cost of hydro is going up. We’re starting to see numbers that are getting competitive.”

Links of interest: 

• King Solar Contracting
• BC Hydro’s Net Metering Program
• Articles About Solar Energy on Cortes Currents 
• Articles about solar in BC

Top image credit: Ian King and Sadhu Johnston in front of the rooftop solar array at Sadhu’s residence- Roy L Hales photo

Correction: In the initial version of this story, Ian King stated he installed ‘about 95 systems’ on Hernando Island. He subsequently informed Cortes Currents that should be ‘about 95% of the systems.’ This correction has been made in both the written and audio versions of this story.

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