This is our first PowerScore snapshot — not a "who moved" story, since there's nothing yet to compare it against. It's the starting line. Every month from here, we'll publish what actually changed.
We built PowerScore — a 0–100 score for every city we cover, based on real published rebate amounts, program status, and how many programs stack — a couple weeks ago. Today we took the first snapshot of it and archived it to powerscore-history/2026-08-23.json, which is the foundation for a recurring monthly standings post.
This post isn't a movers story. With only one snapshot in hand, there's no "up" or "down" to report honestly — anything we said about gains or losses today would be made up. So instead, this is the baseline: where every region and category stood on August 23, 2026. Next month, once we have a second snapshot, we'll publish the real thing — which cities gained ground, which lost it, and why.
Want your own city's number? Look it up on the full PowerScore leaderboard →
Vancouver, British Columbia leads all 99 cities we cover with an overall PowerScore of 89.7 out of 100. Vancouver scores well across nearly every one of our 8 categories — heat pump, insulation, solar, battery, water heater, smart thermostat, EV charger, and windows/doors — largely because BC Hydro and CleanBC programs are currently open, well-funded, and stack cleanly with federal incentives.
Right behind Vancouver is a large cluster of Ontario cities — Barrie, Brampton, Burlington, Cambridge, and more — tied at 81.0. That's not a coincidence or a scoring bug: Ontario's Greener Homes and Enbridge programs apply province-wide, so most Ontario cities land on an identical score unless we've found and verified a genuine local top-up.
Because PowerScore's dollar-value component is normalized within each city's own region (a BC city is compared to BC's strongest program, not to Massachusetts'), the most useful regional comparisons are inside a single region. Here's who leads each of our 8 categories, sitewide:
| Category | Leader | Region | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heat Pump | Barrie | Ontario | 100.0 |
| Insulation | Barrie | Ontario | 100.0 |
| Solar | Abbotsford | British Columbia | 92.5 |
| Battery Storage | Barrie | Ontario | 92.5 |
| Water Heater | Vancouver | British Columbia | 88.8 |
| Smart Thermostat | Vancouver | British Columbia | 88.8 |
| EV Charger | Vancouver | British Columbia | 88.8 |
| Windows & Doors | Vancouver | British Columbia | 92.5 |
Barrie's heat pump and insulation leads come from Ontario's Enbridge Home Efficiency Rebate Plus stacking cleanly with the federal Canada Greener Homes Loan and a strong local program count — 4 and 11 distinct programs respectively, the most of any city we track in either category.
On the other end, Alberta and New York's outer regions currently sit lowest overall — Edmonton at 22.2 and several New York utility territories (National Grid's Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse) at 12.6. In most of these cases that's a real reflection of fewer currently-open, well-funded programs in those areas today, not a data problem. We'll keep updating these city pages as new programs open.
Some of today's category scores are understated because of a parser gap, not a lack of real rebates. PowerScore is calculated automatically from the rebate cards already published on our city and category pages. Right now, our parser isn't correctly picking up rebate cards on a handful of specific region/category combinations:
Every one of these currently shows a score of 0.0, which reads as "no rebate available." That's not accurate — it means our automated scoring hasn't found the rebate cards on those specific pages yet, not that the programs don't exist. We're fixing the parser and will note it in a future standings post once these scores reflect what's actually published. Until then, treat a 0.0 in one of those six combinations as "unmeasured," not "unavailable" — and check the actual city page directly if you're weighing a decision on one of those categories today.
We'll run scripts/snapshot_powerscore.py again to capture a second dated snapshot, then run scripts/powerscore_movers.py to diff it against today's baseline. That's when this series turns into what it's meant to be: a real monthly record of which cities picked up rebate money, which ones lost ground as programs closed or ran out of funding, and which categories saw the biggest swings — grounded entirely in the same rebate numbers already published on our city pages, never invented.
See every city's score, ranked overall and by category.
PowerScore: How We Rank Every CityThe formula behind the number, explained in full.
Compare Two Cities Side by SideSee category-by-category PowerScore for any two cities.
Vancouver Rebate GuideOur #1 nationally-ranked city — see the full program stack.
Look up your city, see your rank, and find out where you can claim more.
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