History
The Nova Scotia Power Commission was formed in 1919 by the provincial government, following the lead of several other Canadian provinces in establishing Crown corporation electrical utilities. The commission constructed and opened its first hydro plant at Tantallon the following year.
Throughout the 1920s-1960s the commission grew as private and municipal owned hydro plants and electrical utilities went bankrupt or sold their assets. In 1960, Nova Scotia was connected to the New Brunswick Power Corporation in the first electrical inter-connection between provinces in Canada.
The commission underwent unprecedented expansion during the late 1960s when five new thermal generating stations were constructed to meet the growing residential and industrial demand in the province.
In 1974, the Nova Scotia Power Commission acquired Nova Scotia Light and Power Ltd., a private company, to form the Nova Scotia Power Corporation (NSPC).
In 1984, NSPC opened the world's first tidal power generating station on the Annapolis River at Annapolis Royal. This technology, similar to hydroelectric dams, did not become globally widespread.
In 1992, NSPC was privatized by the provincial government of Premier Donald Cameron in what was then the largest private equity transaction in Canadian history. Cameron's government had been under heavy pressure to control provincial deficits and debt servicing resulting from his predecessor administrations, thus the controversial decision to sell the Crown corporation. This privatization created Nova Scotia Power Incorporated (NSPI).
On December 2, 1998, NSPI shareholders voted to restructure the company to create a holding company which would be shareholder-owned, with the regulated utility being a wholly owned subsidiary of the holding company. On December 9, 1998, NSPI received approval to establish NS Power Holdings Incorporated and NSPI shareholders exchanged their shares in NSPI for shares in NS Power Holdings Inc. on a one-to-one basis on January 1, 1999. Common shares in NS Power Holdings Inc. began trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Montreal Stock Exchange on January 6, 1999. The NS Power Holdings Inc. name was changed to Emera Incorporated on July 17, 2000.
In 2001, Emera purchased the Bangor Hydro Electric Company of Bangor, Maine; Emera was the first Canadian company to purchase an American utility.
Read more about this topic: Nova Scotia Power
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)