No published solar rule, so ask before you schedule
New Glasgow's Planning and Development department administers building and development permits, including rezoning, subdivision, variance and zoning-confirmation applications. What it does not publish is a solar-specific permit rule or a fee separate from that general process. This page is not going to guess at one on the town's behalf.
The useful response to that gap is a phone call rather than an assumption. Ask the department three things with your quote in hand: whether a roof-mounted or ground-mounted array needs a permit, what it costs under the general fee structure, and how long review takes. Get the answer before a crew is booked, because a permit discovered late is a permit that delays an install that has already been paid a deposit on.
It is also worth asking the question yourself rather than delegating it. An installer working across several Nova Scotia municipalities may be applying a rule from a neighbouring town, and the absence of published guidance is exactly the situation where that goes wrong. The town's own answer is the only one that binds it.
The self-generation option, and why statute beats a programme
Since the Bill 145 amendments took effect in April 2022, residential solar in Nova Scotia connects under a self-generation option written into the Electricity Act rather than under a programme the utility administers at its discretion. For a New Glasgow homeowner planning a purchase that will outlive several governments, that is a meaningful difference: a programme can be closed to new applicants or repriced by the utility that runs it, while a statutory right has to be amended by the legislature.
The administrative path is short. There is no separate net metering application to file, no sign-up fee, and the bidirectional meter is installed at no cost. A licensed installer submits the plans to Nova Scotia Power and the meter is swapped where one is needed. Surplus generation is then banked as a bill credit.
If someone tells you to apply to Nova Scotia Power's net metering programme, they have the wrong process. That programme now carries a 27 kWac minimum, which sits above the residential ceiling of 27 kW, so a house never falls within it. The statutory self-generation option is the residential route and the only one.
1,082 kWh per kW, and the annual cap that governs size
Surplus generation is purchased at a rate equivalent to the rate you pay as a customer, which is 19.128 cents per kWh on the residential tariff effective May 1, 2026. Exporting is therefore not penalised the way it is in a net billing province: a kilowatt-hour sent out is worth what a kilowatt-hour brought in costs.
The limit is annual rather than instantaneous. Exports are bought up to a maximum of your total usage per calendar year, with no compensation for generation above that. So the number that should decide the size of a New Glasgow array is the yearly kWh total on your Nova Scotia Power bills. Natural Resources Canada models 1,082 kWh a year here for each kW installed on an unshaded, well-oriented array, which puts a 6 kW system near 6,490 kWh a year and an 8 kW system near 8,660 kWh. Match the modelled annual output to the annual consumption rather than to the roof.
Credits are banked and settled each January 1, so a summer surplus carries into the winter instead of expiring monthly, which suits the Nova Scotia production curve. Expect the real installation to fall below the benchmark for site-specific reasons: midday shade costs more output than early or late shade, a two-plane array yields less annually than a single well-oriented plane, and snow on a shallow pitch produces nothing until it clears. The residential rate is flat with no mandatory time-of-use pricing, so none of this depends on the hour you run the dishwasher.
A town of houses, with a substantial low-rise share
About 59 per cent of New Glasgow's roughly 4,445 dwellings are single-detached houses, which gives most homeowners direct control over their own roof. For that group the decision is genuinely theirs, and the remaining questions are physical: orientation, pitch, tree cover and how much life the shingles have left.
Low-rise apartments and condominiums under five storeys account for about 28 per cent of dwellings. Solar on those roofs generally needs landlord or condominium board sign-off, so if that describes your building the honest first step is a written request to whoever controls the roof, not a site visit. High-rise buildings are effectively absent from the town at 0.1 per cent of dwellings, so multi-unit solar in New Glasgow means low-rise roofs.
The shared-wall forms are a modest slice: semi-detached at 6.1 per cent, row houses at 2.9 per cent and duplexes at 2.6 per cent. Where they apply, the question is whether the roof plane you want to use is structurally shared with the neighbouring unit, which turns a private decision into a joint one. For a town of 9,471 people, most solar conversations here start and end with a single-detached roof.
What closed, what is financing, and what needs an accountant
Efficiency Nova Scotia's SolarHomes rebate stopped taking new applications on April 17, 2025 and is closed. That is the first thing to check any quote against, because a proposal still carrying a SolarHomes line is priced on a programme that no longer accepts applicants, and it will look cheaper than a proposal that is not.
PACE financing remains on the provincial record. It attaches the cost of an energy retrofit to the property tax bill rather than requiring the money upfront, and it operates in participating municipalities, so ask New Glasgow directly whether it is available at your address instead of assuming from the province-wide listing. It changes the timing of payment rather than the amount.
The federal Clean Technology investment tax credit is not available to a household. Under the Income Tax Act it goes to taxable Canadian corporations and certain trusts. Because an investment tax credit is claimed against a qualifying investment by an eligible claimant, ask an accountant whether your household purchase qualifies before it enters a payback calculation. On storage: Nova Scotia already pays your own retail rate for surplus up to your annual usage, so a battery here is worth pricing for outage cover rather than for arbitrage between two different prices.