A Letter to Glace Bay

February 18, 2025

Thank you for joining members of our Reliability and Customer Care teams at the recent community meeting (February 10, 2025) to talk about power service in your area. We know there have been challenges in the Glace Bay area recently and we are very sorry about the outages you have experienced. We heard your frustration, and we want you to know how committed we are to improving the reliability of power service in your community.

Work Completed or Underway

Some of you mentioned seeing more of our trucks in the area. That’s because there is a lot of work underway. Since the outage last month, we have:

• completed a thorough inspection of the substation,
• inspected the seven electrical circuits and identified the upgrades that need to be completed,
• used a thermal camera to identify equipment that needs to be replaced (transmission, substation, and distribution inspections), and  
• inspected the transmission line by using a helicopter.
  

Crews continue working on all seven electrical circuits serving the Glace Bay area to determine what equipment needs to be repaired or replaced and what other work needs to be done to help improve the reliability of service. In addition to these inspections, crews have also:

• repaired the damaged equipment in the substation, reducing the risk of an outage happening again,
• replaced and/or upgraded 24 poles; using taller, stronger poles that will better withstand the extreme weather,
• replaced equipment at the top of the poles (insulators and switches) that is used to safely deliver electricity to your homes and businesses, and
• identified more equipment and poles during inspections that will be upgraded over the coming weeks.
  

Ongoing Investments

There is more work to do, and we are committed to doing it. We will build on the work our teams have done as we implement our Reliability Plan to strengthen the grid and make it more resilient to the impacts of climate change and severe weather. We will be investing about $1.3 billion in our infrastructure across the province over the next five years—starting with approximately $250 million this year. Glace Bay is part of that. The focus will be in three areas:

1. Vegetation management: Trimming, removing, and clearing trees from power lines and equipment to prevent outages and reduce the length of time they last if there is an interruption. This includes proactive work in the Gardiner Mines area this year.
2. Targeted equipment replacements and upgrades: Upgrading and modernizing equipment—like poles, wires, and protective devices—to continue to strengthen the grid.
3. Modernizing the grid: Addressing aging infrastructure and making sure it is able to continue taking on more renewable energy sources while providing reliable service to customers.
   

Once again, we sincerely apologize for the recent outages you have experienced. We take our commitment to you, our customers, very seriously and are committed to making sure you have service you can count on. Along with ongoing inspections, repairs, and upgrades, we are committed to improving communication by providing regular updates on investments, as well as work being done to improve reliability.

We also want to make sure you have someone you know you can reach out to if you have reliability related questions. Colin Walker is the Reliability Advisor in your area and would be happy to speak with you about any concerns you may have at colin.walker@nspower.ca.

Please visit here for more information on our reliability work >

Sincerely,

Matt Drover | Senior Director, Energy Delivery, Nova Scotia Power

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• Reliability

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