The Nova Scotia Energy Board declined to impose a reliability penalty on Nova Scotia Power in its review of 2025 performance, despite another year of missed targets. The regulator said improved results and an existing reliability plan did not justify a penalty aimed solely at punishing past failures.
In its October 15, 2026 decision on Nova Scotia Power Incorporated’s 2025 Annual Performance Standards Report, 2026 NSEB 22, the Nova Scotia Energy Board accepted the report but ordered more detailed outage reporting and warned that penalties could follow if reliability improvements stall or reverse.
The decision did not clear the utility over two missed customer-service targets linked to its 2025 cybersecurity incident. The board deferred those findings to its separate cybersecurity proceedings.
Improvement alongside missed targets
The report recorded 26 achieved targets and six missed targets. The failures included system-wide outage duration, outage duration on one circuit, outage frequency on two circuits, call-answering performance and the proportion of estimated bills.
The standard measure of average outage duration improved from 5.26 hours in 2024 to 4.79 hours in 2025, but remained above the 4.29-hour target. Average outage frequency met its target, falling to 1.57 interruptions.
Those figures exclude major and extreme event days and planned outages. They are not a measure of every interruption customers experienced. The broader all-inclusive results were 2.92 interruptions and 10.19 hours in 2025, compared with 2.75 interruptions and 6.34 hours in 2024. The all-inclusive measures inform the board but are not themselves approved performance standards.
The board noted that 2025 was the ninth consecutive year in which at least one performance target was missed. It also questioned why the utility expected to reach the outage-duration target only by 2029, about 12 years after the standards were introduced.
Why no penalty was imposed
The Public Utilities Act allows the board to impose an administrative penalty, require a compliance plan, or do both when a performance standard is missed. But a penalty must promote future compliance, rather than punish past conduct or redress a wrong to society.
The Consumer Advocate and other intervenors raised the possibility of a penalty. The Small Business Advocate emphasized customers’ frustration that rising rates had not delivered the expected reliability improvements. Industrial customers questioned whether the utility’s investments were the most cost-effective way to achieve compliance.
Nova Scotia Power argued that its improving results and five-year reliability strategy made a penalty unnecessary.
The board found that the reliability measures at issue had improved from 2024. It also noted that the utility had put forward a five-year plan involving $1.3 billion in investment. Ordering another plan while that initiative was being reviewed in a separate proceeding would not be productive.
That was not an endorsement of every proposed expenditure. The board said it was unclear whether the improvement reflected the plan or better weather, and called for careful scrutiny of whether the approach would deliver the best results for customers. Its decision to forgo a penalty rested on the forward-looking purpose of the legislation, not a finding that all targets had been met.
Cybersecurity issues left to other proceedings
Only 60.6 per cent of regular business calls were answered within 30 seconds, against a 70 per cent target. Estimated bills accounted for 37.8 per cent of bills, far above the two per cent limit.
The utility attributed those failures to the cybersecurity incident reported on April 25, 2025, which disrupted automated billing and increased customer inquiries. The board acknowledged that explanation but deferred its findings on those two failures rather than deciding them in this annual review.
More detail on customers’ outage experience
Future reports must better show where interruptions occur and what causes them. The board ordered consolidated reporting on transmission-related loss of supply, recurring substation impacts and constraints that affect local circuits.
It also required planned-outage information broken down by circuit or substation groupings. The 2026 report must explain notification, coordination and scheduling practices in more detail and report on identified chronic circuits.
The result leaves the utility without a new reliability penalty in this proceeding, but with additional disclosure obligations and an express warning that stalled or deteriorating performance could warrant penalties later.
