Funding
A public owner does not have to wait for new policy. The anchor credit is in force, two of the stacking programs are open now, and the honest plan names the doors that are closed. Here is the funding, and how a hardened hub pays for itself over time.
What a hub can claim
Hardening a trusted building with rooftop solar and battery backup is a capital project. For a public or community owner the realistic stack is a federal refundable tax credit, a municipal retrofit fund, and Ontario's efficiency program. The rates below are real and current. None of it is guaranteed money. Eligibility is the first step, and every project still needs a site audit.
The anchor, and the only federal clean-energy tax credit a public owner can actually reach. A municipally or Indigenous-owned corporation claims 15 percent of eligible solar, storage, and grid equipment back as a refundable credit. Enacted through Bill C-15, Royal Assent March 26, 2026.
Worth up to 30 percent, but claimable only by taxable Canadian corporations. A library, gurdwara, mosque, or municipal centre is tax-exempt, so it reaches this rate only if the system is owned through a taxable project company. That gap is why the 15 percent credit, not this one, is the lever for a community hub.
A federal grant and loan package, delivered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, for energy retrofits of public community buildings. A municipality applies, and it can fund buildings the municipality or a non-profit owns. Capital projects need a measured emissions reduction to qualify.
Ontario's energy-efficiency program covers up to half of an eligible retrofit, including behind-the-meter solar. Municipal and institutional building owners qualify directly. A faith building qualifies as a commercial or institutional owner, or through a partner.
Two adjacent programs are named here for honesty, not counted in the stack. Natural Resources Canada's Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways still holds capital, but its main streams are not taking new proposals right now. The federal Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund is fully allocated, with no open intake. An honest plan tracks both for the next funding round instead of assuming today's door is open.
NRCan · Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways Infrastructure Canada · Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund
How it works
Sanctuary scores trusted buildings already inside the heat risk and ranks the five to investigate first. That is what this prototype does today.
Before any hardening, a site audit checks roof condition, electrical readiness, cooling, accessibility, and the owner's agreement. The score is a planning screen, not a green light.
The capital stack above pays to add rooftop solar and a battery. A public owner anchors it with the 15 percent Clean Electricity credit, topped up by the Green Municipal Fund and Save on Energy.
On a normal day the solar and battery support the local grid. In an outage the battery islands the building, keeping cooling, charging, and communications running when the grid goes dark.
Operating model
This is the future operating model, labelled as such. The prototype ranks candidate hubs. It does not run a microgrid, and no named building generates revenue or islands from the grid today.
On normal days the rooftop solar and battery are not idle. Aggregated across many hubs they can shave peak demand and take part in Ontario's demand-response and capacity markets as distributed energy resources, earning operating revenue that helps sustain the building.
When the grid fails, the same battery disconnects and runs the building on stored power, holding the loads that keep people safe: cooling, medical refrigeration, device charging, and a place to get information. The refuge keeps power instead of going dark.
The funding stack covers the hardening. A municipal or utility partner operates the network, and blue-sky revenue offsets running costs. Alectra's GridExchange transactive-energy pilot, run elsewhere in the Greater Golden Horseshoe, is the kind of template Peel could adopt rather than a Peel deployment.
Alectra · GridExchange launch