This article was written by Matthew McClearn and was published in the Globe & Mail on September 11, 2025.
Nova Scotia Power demonstrated “a lack of urgency” in meeting provincial standards for electricity service reliability, its regulator has found, after the electrical utility failed to achieve those standards for the eighth year in a row.
The Nova Scotia Energy Board fined the power utility $1million on Wednesday for its performance in 2024. The board expressed concern over Nova Scotia Power’s position that it doesn’t expect to meet the standards until 2029, and also its “apparent reluctance to move beyond frequent referral to weather conditions” when explaining its failures, which raised doubts about its commitment to improvement.
“Progress has been lagging,” the regulator concluded. “More needs to be done and with greater urgency. … It is not acceptable that non-compliance of the performance standards has become a normal occurrence for NS Power.”
The board introduced reliability requirements for Nova Scotia Power in 2017. In particular, it set targets for industrystandard reliability metrics such as System Average Interruption Frequency Index, or SAIFI, which measures the average number of outages customers experience each year; and System Average Interruption Duration Index, or SAIDI, which represents the total duration of outages experienced by the average customer during the year. Deteriorating SAIFI and SAIDI can be early indicators that a utility is underinvesting in reliability.
Last year, Nova Scotia Power’s SAIDI was 5.26, meaning, on average, its customers experienced power outages lasting a total of five hours and 16 minutes in 2024. (The target is 4.29.)
“SAIDI has generally gotten worse in recent years and failed the standard again in 2024, having not satisfied the target since 2020,” the regulator observed in its decision.
However, Nova Scotia Power met 12 of the 14 targets. For example, it achieved all customer-service targets, which include the percentage of calls answered within 30 seconds and connection times for new customers.
Advocates for Nova Scotia’s small businesses and consumers slammed the company’s performance in submissions to the regulator earlier this year. Melissa MacAdam, a lawyer with the firm Blackburn Law who represents small businesses, said the missed SAIDI target was of the greatest concern.
“Longer duration outages directly affect small businesses through the loss of revenue and inventory, equipment damage, overall productivity etc.,” she wrote.
David Roberts, a lawyer with Halifax-based firm Pink Larkin who represents the interests of consumers, called for penalties while criticizing Nova Scotia Power’s arguments for lowering the provincial standards.
“Further incentives are clearly needed,” Mr. Roberts wrote. In its own assessment of its 2024 performance, Nova Scotia Power congratulated itself on its best reliability showing since 2005, and said it beat the national average for outage duration and frequency.
“These results demonstrate that while there is more to do, the Company’s focus on removing trees from rights-of-way, storm hardening the system (i.e. equipment replacements and upgrades) and modernizing the grid is helping to prevent outages.”
The utility said it was hiring more field staff and spending more on cutting back vegetation along its rights-of-way. Newly installed poles will be larger and stronger than their predecessors, capable of withstanding gusts of 110 kilometres an hour.
Citing its strained financial position, Nova Scotia Power asked that the board not levy an administrative penalty.
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