Nova Scotia Power is one of the largest landowners in the Province of Nova Scotia. You’ll find details about the property we own and have access to and how we manage it in this section.
Ensuring dependable service means carefully maintaining the right-of-ways our poles and lines run through. These are a critical part of how we deliver power to our customers. We own some of the land where our transmission and distribution lines are based, but through legal agreements we also make use of a great deal of land owned by others.
One important part of maintaining our right-of-ways in an environmentally responsible way is identifying where sensitive species make their habitats. We have worked with the Nova Scotia government to identify the locations of protected areas near the provincial power system. This ensures we have the information we need to responsibly manage these important areas.
We see a managed system as a combination of things – we want to stop trees from growing up into our power lines and we want to create animal habitat. We seek out opportunities to grow compatible crops and vegetation such as blueberries or Christmas trees on right-of-ways. In fact, landowners with property that abuts a transmission line can contact us to get approval to use right-of-way land to grow approved crops like these.
We own as many as 3,500 individual parcels of property across the Province of Nova Scotia. This is a significant investment, and we have a process in place to manage it.
Over the time our company has been in operation, we have had an environmental impact on some of the properties we own. We are proactively assessing the conditions on this land to understand any environmental impacts which may have occurred. When it is deemed necessary, we will take action to address any environmental impact that may have occurred. In the vast majority of cases, there is either no or a very low environmental impact on pieces of property we own.