Commercial solar and storage economics start with the bill and evidence.

Start with the bill, not a national average

The tariff determines which electricity charges a project can affect. Energy, demand, delivery, Global Adjustment, riders, and fixed charges do not respond to solar or storage in the same way. A project screen therefore starts with the customer's utility, rate class, billing units, and interval data.

Enerwav does not load a representative Canadian electricity price. The Explorer accepts user evidence and shows which outputs remain unavailable when the controlling tariff is missing.

Keep capital cost and tax treatment separate

Installed cost must come from a project budget or user input. The Clean Technology Investment Tax Credit and capital cost allowance can change after-tax economics, but neither establishes the eligible basis for a project.

The tax guides expose claimant, property, labour, assistance, available-for-use, UCC treatment, and tax-rate questions. A tax professional must confirm the final treatment.

Match operating value to measured load

Annual electricity consumption can bound solar self-consumption, but it cannot establish peak clipping, storage dispatch, or Global Adjustment results. Those questions need interval load and the applicable settlement rules.

Storage value remains a range until power, energy, efficiency, cycling, tariff, and dispatch conditions are explicit.

Use the guide that matches the decision

Each economics route answers a different question and carries its own evidence limits.

Build the model in evidence order

A useful screen follows the order in which uncertainty enters the decision. First identify the electricity account and billing structure. Next define the physical project boundary and the load it can serve. Then add cost, tax, contract, and operating inputs. Reversing that order can produce a polished payback result for the wrong tariff, an unapproved project size, or an ineligible tax basis.

The model should preserve the source of every input. A bill supplies rate-class and billing evidence. Interval files describe timing. A project budget supplies cost. Official tax pages supply program mechanics, while the claimant and adviser establish whether those mechanics apply. Contract documents allocate operating and exit risk. Enerwav keeps these evidence classes separate so one strong source cannot conceal a missing input elsewhere.

Separate screening, study, and approval

A screening model answers whether a scenario deserves further work. It does not approve structural loading, utility connection, tax treatment, financing, fire-safety design, or contract terms. Those decisions belong to the responsible engineer, utility, accountant, lender, insurer, owner, or authority having jurisdiction. The economic screen should show which party must close each unknown before capital is committed.

The requirements brief turns the screen into a list of evidence requests. The site team can then replace preliminary inputs with measured dimensions, interval records, quotations, utility responses, and professional opinions. Each replacement should change only the calculation that depends on it. This makes the model auditable and prevents a later project update from silently changing unrelated assumptions.

Assign each bill component its own value path

Solar can reduce imported energy when production coincides with load. Exported energy needs a separate credit rule. Storage can change a measured peak only when power, energy, controls, and timing support the dispatch. Ontario Global Adjustment uses settlement mechanics that differ from a local demand charge. Fixed charges and unrelated riders should remain outside avoided-value arithmetic unless the controlling tariff says otherwise.

A single blended electricity price hides these distinctions. It may overstate value by treating all bill charges as avoidable, or understate value by ignoring a verified demand component. The better method lists each charge, its unit, its measurement period, the project mechanism that could affect it, and the evidence required to calculate the effect.

Keep a decision record beside the result

The useful output is not only a payback range. It is a record of what the owner entered, what the official sources establish, what the model calculated, and what remains suppressed. That record should include dates because tariffs, tax rules, project budgets, and operating plans can change while a project moves from screening to procurement.

When a source is under review, the dependent claim must disappear rather than inherit the status of another source. When a user enters an illustrative value, the result should say that it is a user scenario. When the model applies a formula, the formula identifier and displayed equation should remain available. These controls let a reviewer challenge the right assumption instead of reverse-engineering a final number.

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