The annual consumption ceiling, and how to find yours
Surplus generation in Nova Scotia is purchased at a rate equivalent to the rate the customer pays, which for a Kentville household is the residential tariff at 19.128 cents per kWh effective May 1, 2026. Under that arrangement an exported kilowatt-hour is worth what an imported one costs.
The catch is a ceiling rather than a discount. Exports are purchased up to a maximum of your total usage per calendar year, and there is no compensation for generation above your annual consumption. Production past that line is not paid at a lower rate, it is not paid at all. So the whole sizing question reduces to one figure you already have access to.
Pull twelve consecutive months of statements and total the kWh. That number, adjusted for anything you know is changing such as a heat pump or an electric vehicle arriving, is the annual output a system should be aiming at. If a proposal models materially more than it, ask the installer to justify the extra capacity, because the export terms will not. Credits are banked and settled each January 1, so a summer surplus carries into winter rather than expiring monthly, but the annual total is still the cap.
Connecting under the Act: no application, no fee, no meter charge
Nova Scotia Power serves Kentville, and since the Bill 145 amendments took effect in April 2022 residential solar up to 27 kW connects under a self-generation option written into the Electricity Act. That wording matters because it makes the arrangement a right rather than a discretionary programme. A utility programme can be closed to new applicants or repriced by the utility that runs it; changing a statutory right takes legislation.
There is very little for a homeowner to do administratively. No separate net metering application, no sign-up fee, and a bidirectional meter installed at no cost. A licensed installer submits the plans and Nova Scotia Power handles the meter. Surplus then banks as a bill credit against the January 1 settlement.
Nova Scotia Power does run a net metering programme, but it is not yours. It now carries a 27 kWac minimum, above the residential ceiling, so a Kentville house never falls under it. If a quote or a contractor refers to a net metering application, that is a sign they are describing a process that does not apply to a residential install here. Rates and tariffs are approved through the Nova Scotia Energy Board if you want to read the terms at source.
1,123 kWh per installed kW on a clear roof
Natural Resources Canada's photovoltaic dataset models Kentville at 1,123 kWh a year for each kW of installed capacity on an unshaded, well-oriented array. A 6 kW system therefore sits near 6,740 kWh a year on that basis, and an 8 kW system near 8,980 kWh. Put whichever applies next to the annual total from your bills, and you have most of the answer about sizing in one comparison.
The benchmark assumes conditions your roof may not have. Shading in the middle of the day costs disproportionately more output than shading at dawn or dusk, because that is when the array should be working hardest. Splitting panels across east and west planes produces less over a year than concentrating them on one well-oriented plane. Snow sitting on a shallow pitch generates nothing until it slides or melts, which pushes an Annapolis Valley system's output towards the warmer months.
None of that is an argument against solar in Kentville. It is an argument for a site-specific model over a provincial average, and for asking what the model assumed about trees, roof orientation and snow. The residential rate is flat with no mandatory time-of-use pricing, so nothing about the hour you use electricity changes the value of production. Only the annual total does.
Who controls the roof across 2,955 dwellings
Kentville has roughly 2,955 dwellings and about 58 per cent of them are single-detached houses. For that majority the roof is independently controlled, so the decision belongs to the homeowner and the remaining questions are physical ones about pitch, orientation, shade and the condition of the roof covering.
Low-rise apartments and condominiums make up about 27 per cent of dwellings. Rooftop solar on those buildings generally needs landlord or condominium board approval, which means the first move for a resident is a written question rather than a site visit. There are no high-rise buildings recorded in Kentville's dwelling stock, so multi-unit solar here means low-rise roofs and the people who own them.
Semi-detached homes at 6.9 per cent and duplexes at 6.1 per cent make up a modest but non-trivial slice where shared-roof considerations apply. If a party wall runs under the roof plane you want to use, establish whose side is whose before a layout is designed. For a town of 6,630 people, that is a small number of households, but for those households it is the first question rather than a detail.
The closed rebate, the financing, and the tax credit
Efficiency Nova Scotia's SolarHomes rebate stopped taking new applications on April 17, 2025 and is closed. If you gathered quotes or read a payback estimate before that date, or if a proposal still shows a SolarHomes amount, the arithmetic behind it no longer holds. Check every quote for it before comparing prices.
PACE financing appears on the provincial record and is available in participating municipalities. It attaches the cost of an energy retrofit to the property tax bill rather than requiring cash at the outset, so it can make a project possible for a household that cannot fund it upfront. Ask the town whether Kentville participates, since the listing is provincial rather than universal, and remember that it changes the timing of payment rather than the amount.
The federal Clean Technology investment tax credit does not reach a household purchase: the Income Tax Act limits it to taxable Canadian corporations and certain trusts. It is claimed against a qualifying investment by an eligible claimant, so ask an accountant whether a household rooftop purchase qualifies before treating it as money off. And on batteries: since surplus in Nova Scotia is bought at your own retail rate up to your annual usage, a battery in Kentville earns its keep as backup during an outage rather than by exploiting a gap between import and export prices.