50 $ plus 0.25 percent, and what that means in practice
Amherst requires a permit for new construction, demolition, renovations, decks, signs, sheds and garages. Solar is not named as its own category, so the working assumption is that a rooftop array falls under the renovation heading, and the right move is to have the town confirm which permit applies at your address before equipment is ordered.
An Existing Construction or Renovation Permit costs 50 $ plus 0.25 percent of the project's value. Unlike a flat fee, this scales: a larger system means a larger permit fee. The amounts involved are modest relative to a solar project, but the mechanism matters for a different reason. The project value you declare is a number the town will ask for, so keep the itemised cost breakdown from your installer and make sure the figure used is one you can support.
Ask the town two things when you confirm the permit type: what the application has to contain for a rooftop installation, and what processing time to expect. Agree in writing with your installer who prepares and submits it, and who pays the fee. On a permit priced by formula, an installer who cannot tell you how the fee is calculated has probably not pulled one here.
The Self-Generation Option, and the January 1 settlement
Since April 2022, under the Bill 145 amendments, residential solar up to 27 kW connects through Nova Scotia Power's Self-Generation Option. There is no separate net-metering application to file and no fee, and the bidirectional meter that measures both what you draw and what you export is installed at no cost. That removes an entire approval step compared with provinces where a distributor must first evaluate circuit capacity.
Surplus generation banks as a bill credit, and the settlement timing is the detail that should govern your system size: credits are settled each January 1. That falls at the end of the darkest quarter, after months of running down whatever the summer built. A summer surplus therefore has roughly half a year to be consumed before the reset, which is usually enough for a system matched to the household and not enough for one that is not.
So size to what you actually use across a year rather than to the roof you have. The 27 kW ceiling is not the binding constraint on a house; your own consumption is. Give your installer twelve months of your own kilowatt hour totals rather than dollar totals.
A flat tariff, so timing your usage earns nothing
The default residential rate is a flat Domestic Service Tariff with no mandatory time-of-use pricing. There are no peak hours to avoid in Amherst and no cheaper overnight window, so the widely circulated advice about running appliances late at night does not apply here.
That also settles the honest case for a battery. Where a utility charges more at peak times, storage earns money by shifting consumption out of those hours, and that argument does not exist on a flat rate. With credit banking on top, the grid is already storing your surplus and returning it later without you paying for hardware.
What remains is resilience. A grid-tied array without storage shuts down during an outage, because it must not push power into lines crews may be working on. If outages at your address are frequent enough to matter to you, price a battery as backup and judge it on that basis rather than on savings a flat tariff will not produce.
What funding remains
Efficiency Nova Scotia's SolarHomes rebate stopped taking new applications on April 17, 2025 and is closed. If you are working from a quote, an article or a savings calculation prepared before that date, check whether it assumes SolarHomes money, because a payback figure that includes a closed rebate is wrong by the whole value of it. This is currently the most likely source of an inflated expectation in Nova Scotia.
Federally, the Canada Greener Homes Loan, interest-free up to 40,000 $, stopped accepting new applications on October 2, 2025, and only previously approved loans are still being funded. The Canada Greener Homes Affordability Program replaced it in September 2025, delivering no-cost retrofits through provincial partners for low- to median-income households, with solar PV federally eligible but each province setting its own technology list. Check what Nova Scotia has actually included rather than what the federal programme permits.
Canada has no federal investment tax credit for residential solar. So the realistic Amherst arithmetic is the value of self-generated and banked electricity over time, against a system cost that carries a permit fee of 50 $ plus 0.25 percent of value and no rebate. Ask any installer quoting you to show the calculation with SolarHomes removed.