Upgrading the meter on each home and business from Yarmouth to Meat Cove – and in every community in between – is a big job. It’s about 500,000 meters in total, and we plan to swap out an average of 2,000 per day. We will begin installing new meters in the fall of 2019 and aim to be finished by early 2021.
We will notify you in advance to let you know when we’ll be making upgrades in your community. In most cases, nothing is required by you. Larger customers, like businesses, office buildings and public institutions, and customers with indoor meters that are inaccessible, will require an appointment, which will be booked in advance.
Until our provincewide roll-out of new meters is complete, how we serve you won’t change. You will continue to have your meter manually read every two months, while we build the smart meter network.
Once the new meters are fully upgraded, we will activate the “smart” technology in the meter, enabling you to enjoy all the benefits of smart meters. Until the smart technology is activated, your new meter will act like your current meter today.
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 not to upgrade to a smart meter (opt out), 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 on to all our customers.
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.
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 from your meter to a collector located nearby. These collectors will then use the cellular network to relay energy usage information (or data) back to our main data centre.
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:
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.
Safety is always our first priority. Smart meters are currently used in 70% of Canadian homes and as a late adopter, we’ve had the opportunity to carefully review the technology. We are confident the meters used for our Smart Meter Upgrade are safe, accurate, and secure. All meters we use meet or exceed industry regulations and standards, which are in place to help ensure the health and safety of our employees and our customers. Our smart meters will adhere to a long list of standards established by third-party organizations such as:
