Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston tabled the Powering the Economy Act on February 24, 2026, creating an offshore wind revenue law with a $750,000 licence fee and a $7,000-per-megawatt annual levy. Three weeks earlier, on February 4, Nova Scotia signed a memorandum with Massachusetts to explore exporting offshore wind power to the state.
Setting the province’s price
Nova Scotia moved in February to turn its offshore wind ambitions into a priced, regulated industry. The Powering the Economy Act, tabled by Premier Tim Houston on February 24, creates an Offshore Renewable Energy Revenue Act setting a refundable $250,000 bid fee, a non-refundable $750,000 licence fee and an annual capacity levy of $7,000 per megawatt for a project’s first ten years of operation. After that decade, the province can keep the levy or switch to a percentage of gross revenues.
The levy replaces a blunter idea. Provincial officials had earlier floated a four per cent royalty on gross revenues — potentially worth about $100 million a year — but Houston told reporters the province had to thread a needle: charge too aggressively and developers might not bid at all in Canada’s first offshore wind auction.
“This legislation makes sure Nova Scotians reap the full benefits of offshore wind and onshore natural resources and that our electricity system is serving us well, now and in the future,” Houston said. “Offshore wind is a game-changer that will help pay for the services Nova Scotians deserve.”
The same bill looks beyond wind. It repeals the Petroleum Resources Act and replaces it with a Subsurface Energy Resource Extraction Act covering geothermal energy, natural hydrogen, helium and carbon storage, and it adjusts the timeline for moving grid operations from Nova Scotia Power to a new Independent Energy System Operator.
First, find a buyer
The revenue law arrived three weeks after Houston solved the other half of the problem: a customer. At a Boston news conference on February 4, Houston and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on offshore wind development, transmission planning and workforce expertise, with Massachusetts exploring Nova Scotia as a future supplier.
The arithmetic is the pitch. “Nova Scotia only uses about two gigawatts of energy at peak demand, and in the Nova Scotia offshore we can produce 40, 50, 60 gigawatts,” Houston said. His Wind West proposal envisions a $60-billion first phase producing five gigawatts by 2033 — more than double the province’s own needs — and over 62 gigawatts at full build-out, roughly a quarter of Canada’s total energy capacity. About a third of the first-phase cost is transmission: either overland lines through New Brunswick or a subsea cable to Quebec or New England.
Healey, whose state energy officials estimate Massachusetts will need 140 terawatt hours a year by 2050, said surging demand, including from artificial intelligence, meant “we just need a lot more energy.” The timing also favours Nova Scotia: Washington had paused large U.S. offshore wind projects in December, and although courts later allowed five projects totalling six gigawatts to proceed, American supply remains politically uncertain.
What happens next
Nova Scotia is not selling paper ambitions alone. Through the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Energy Regulator, the province has already launched the country’s first offshore wind tendering process: a call for information and prequalification opened in October 2025 and closed in mid-January 2026, ahead of the first call for bids for seabed licences.
Ottawa is aligned. Prime Minister Mark Carney listed Wind West in September among five early-stage projects that could be fast-tracked for federal approvals, and Nova Scotia is seeking federal investment tax credits and low-cost Canada Infrastructure Bank financing — support the province says would cut offshore wind’s cost from an estimated $240 per megawatt hour to about $170.
Set the fees, sign the buyer, run the auction: February’s two announcements, taken together, are the moment Nova Scotia’s “energy superpower” slogan became a sequence of dated, costed steps — with the first bids now the next test.
