The Self-Generation Option, and the January 1 settlement
Under the Bill 145 amendments in force since April 2022, a residential system 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. Compared with provinces where a distributor evaluates network capacity before granting conditional acceptance, that removes an entire approval step and the uncertainty attached to it.
Surplus generation banks as a bill credit, and the detail that should drive your system size is when that bank empties: credits are settled each January 1. That date is the least favourable one imaginable for a solar household, because it falls at the end of the darkest quarter, after months of running a deficit. A summer surplus therefore has roughly half a year to be consumed before the reset, which it usually can be, but a system built well past your own annual consumption will accumulate credit that the settlement takes away.
The design rule that follows is the same one as everywhere, but the deadline makes it sharper here. Size the array to what your household actually uses across a year rather than to the roof area available, and give your installer twelve months of your own kilowatt hour totals rather than dollar totals. The 27 kW ceiling is not the constraint; your own consumption is.
A flat tariff, so there is nothing to shift
The default residential rate is a flat Domestic Service Tariff with no mandatory time-of-use pricing. That is worth stating plainly because so much general solar advice assumes the opposite. There are no peak hours to avoid in Dartmouth and no cheaper overnight window, so running the dishwasher at eleven at night saves nothing.
It also changes the honest case for a battery. Where a utility charges more at peak times, a battery earns money by shifting consumption out of those hours, and that argument does not exist on a flat tariff. Under a flat rate with credit banking, the grid is already storing your surplus at parity and giving it back later, without you paying for hardware.
That leaves resilience as the real reason to consider storage here, not arbitrage. 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, price a battery as backup and judge it on that, rather than on savings that a flat tariff will not deliver.
The HRM permit: a flat 150 $, plus possible engineering fees
Dartmouth is part of Halifax Regional Municipality and uses the same building permit process. A flat 150 $ fee applies to roof- or ground-mounted solar collectors, effective April 1, 2024 under HRM's License, Permit and Processing Fees Administrative Order #15. A flat fee is unusual and it is good news: in municipalities that price permits as a percentage of construction value, a solar permit scales with the size of your system, and here it does not.
The qualifier in the fee schedule is that engineering-related fees may apply on top. That is the part to ask about before you accept a quote, because it is the variable one. Ask HRM what triggers an engineering review for a rooftop array and whether anything about your roof structure or your proposed layout is likely to trigger it at your address.
Make sure the quote you are comparing says who pays the permit fee and who files the application. On a project where the municipal cost is a known 150 $, an installer who cannot tell you that number is not familiar with working here.
What is left after SolarHomes closed
Efficiency Nova Scotia's SolarHomes rebate stopped taking new applications on April 17, 2025 and is closed. If you are working from a quote, a savings calculation or an article written 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 the rebate. This is the single most likely source of an inflated expectation in Nova Scotia right now.
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 Dartmouth arithmetic is the value of self-generated and banked electricity over time, against a system cost with a known 150 $ permit and no rebate. A well oriented roof here produces about 1,075 kilowatt hours a year per kilowatt installed, which is the number to build that calculation on.