Smart Meters

Today,  your meter is read manually approximately every 60 days to produce a bill with basic information about energy usage. Smart meters will provide a safe, secure, and two-way connection between the meter and Nova Scotia Power, helping us provide a more reliable service to our customers, and helping you understand your own energy usage better.

Beginning in late 2019, we will be upgrading meters and building our smart network in preparation for smart meter technology to be turned on in 2021.

If you decide to opt-out from upgrading to a smart meter you will be selecting a non-standard meter service and will be charged a fee based on cost recovery for manual meter reading. This ensures these costs are not passed onto to all customers.

These fees have been estimated as follows:

• Customers whose meters are currently read every two months will move to two reads per year and pay a fee of approximately $4 per month.
• Customers whose meters are currently read each month will continue to have monthly reads and pay a fee of approximately $22 per month.

This calculation is subject to the review and approval of the Nova Scotia Utility and Review Board (UARB). These fees are an estimate and will not be charged to customers until the smart meter upgrade is complete and approval is received from the UARB to begin charging fees.

In order to opt-out, you are required to review and submit an acknowledgement form and a member of our Customer Care team will contact you to confirm your selection and next steps.

Opt-out form for residential customers

Opt-out form for businesses 

Tribus Services was selected as the smart meter installation vendor for our meter upgrade based on a competitive procurement process, which highlighted the company’s extensive experience with smart meter installations across North America, including installing over 2 million smart meters in Canada.

The words OpenWay Riva will be noted on all smart meters used by Nova Scotia Power.

Photo comparisons are available by downloading this document.

Your meter technician will arrive in a co-branded vehicle and will be wearing co-branded safety gear with Nova Scotia Power and Tribus Services logos. Additionally, your technician will have an identification badge with the Nova Scotia Power logo and ‘Authorized Contractor’ included on it.

Nova Scotia Power is building a secure and private communication network (we will not be using your WiFi). When meters have been upgraded and the communication network is up and running, meters will use wireless communication to securely transmit your energy usage information to Nova Scotia Power.

Smart meters will collect and send information related to electricity usage and power quality in a secure, encrypted format. They will not communicate information to Nova Scotia Power such as:

• The specific electronics a customer is using throughout the day.
• Customer names, addresses or account numbers. 

NS Power takes the privacy of our customers’ information very seriously. We do not sell our customers’ personal information and only share it with third parties in limited circumstances, as described in our Customer Privacy Policy.

Nova Scotia Power takes the privacy of our customers’ personal information very seriously and protects and discloses customer personal information in accordance with the requirements set out in the Federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act. For more information on how we collect, use, and disclose personal information, see our Customer Privacy Policy.

The data transmitted from the meter to the collector will be encrypted; this means that it is locked with a unique key and only accessible with the matching key owned by Nova Scotia Power. The collector then sends the encrypted data to our system where it will be unlocked and used to generate bills. In 2021, the data will also be available to you through your online account where you can view your energy usage in intervals as frequent as 15 minutes. You can access updates on your energy usage consumption daily.

No. In the future, smart meters may enable us to provide our customers with more rate options, such as time-of-day, to best suit their lifestyle and energy use.

Our first focus is on the successful deployment of smart meters and we’ll be talking to customers about future opportunities such as different rate options and technology applications in 2020.

No. The smart meter upgrade will not impact current power rates. You will get the benefits of smart meter technology without paying more through electricity rates because smart meters will make our business more efficient, paying for the investment over time.