Canada’s trade tribunal has scrapped the extra import taxes it had been charging on Chinese solar panels since 2015. The United States is going the other way, adding tariffs that now reach right up the supply chain to polysilicon. For the first time in a decade, installers in Canada and the United States are buying equipment under completely different rules.

For Canada, cheaper panel imports are good news. But if you sell solar somewhere cold, the real question is simpler: once a panel is on a roof, how much power does it produce? Firefly Solar tracks the performance of more than 4,100 home solar systems in real time, panel by panel. Most are in Alberta, with smaller groups in Nova Scotia, British Columbia and New Brunswick. Here’s what they’ve taught us.

For this analysis, we focused on a clean sample of 573 Alberta systems with an uninterrupted monthly record for all of 2025. The average rooftop system generated 1,309 kWh of electricity for every kilowatt of panels. Most landed somewhere between 1,170 kWh/kW and 1,469 kWh/kW – that’s across roofs facing south, east and west.

To put that in context, the European Commission’s free solar calculator, PVGIS, predicts 1,030 kWh/kW for a perfectly angled, south-facing rooftop in Frankfurt, and 972 kWh/kW in London. Everyday Alberta roofs, facing all kinds of directions, generated on average close to 25% more than an ideal German roof is expected to. High elevation, dry air and long summer days do a lot of the heavy lifting.

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