Could paying your power bill help build a new recreation centre, fund a seniors’ program, or get a road paved in your town?

It could if you lived in Antigonish, Mahone Bay, or Berwick, Nova Scotia; three towns with co-ownership of Alternative Resource Energy Authority (AREA), a municipally owned renewable energy corporation that powers homes, businesses, and community optimism.

The AREA story began in 2014 when the three communities joined forces to develop the 10-turbine Ellerhouse Wind Farm, which would supply 40 per cent of their electricity needs. Under Nova Scotian law, the municipal electric utilities owned by each town were not allowed to set up an independent power utility within Nova Scotia Power’s jurisdiction. To work around this roadblock, “they created a municipal corporation that wasn’t a utility but that was a power generator that could then sell the power to the municipalities,” explains Meg Hodges, manager of Partnerships and Community Engagement with AREA.

“Instead of our town residents paying their power bill to Nova Scotia Power, they pay their power bill to the town, much like you would pay your water bill,” she says.

Since municipalities have few options to create capital other than through taxation, the AREA model allows them to allocate funds for community projects via municipal electricity charges. As a result of this model, money stays in local communities rather than ending up in the pockets of shareholders.

Hodges first became involved with AREA In 2019, when funding became available for community solar energy production. A councillor for the municipality of Kings at that time, since 2023, she has been working full time with the company. In the past five years, large-scale photovoltaic (solar cell) projects have been constructed in the three founding communities, on land considered unsuitable for other developments.

“In Berwick, we have a solar garden on a fairly swampy piece of farmland that was unproductive for agriculture; there’s about 5 megawatts of solar there,” Hodges says. “In Antigonish, there’s about 1.8 MW of solar on a partially decommissioned landfill, and in Mahone Bay there’s about 1.5 MW on land that is within their wastewater utility treatment site.”

Hodges adds that AREA is helping all area utilities get to net zero, hoping to be the first area in Canada to reach that goal.

“Our mandate is to help these towns have a cleaner, more stable energy [source] than they would get from Nova Scotia Power alone,” she says.

Now that these innovative solar projects are up and running, Hodges and AREA are working on strengthening relationships among Maritime communities with similar energy goals.

“I’ve been working with Maritime municipal electric utilities in Saint John, Perth-Andover, Edmundston, and Summerside, along with Antigonish, Berwick, Mahone Bay, and Riverport to create the Maritime Municipal Electric Utility Alliance (MMEUA),” Hodges says.

As a group, she says they’ll be looking at ways to work on joint procurement and joint funding through ACOA or other larger funding agencies that individually they might not have access to, adding that she hopes the funding will aid the transition to automated metering and billing, among other things.

“We’re looking forward to moving into the 21st century with the rest of the big guys,” Hodges says.

To this end, the MMEUA has joined forces with the Smart Grid Innovation Network, an organization that advocates for the transition to cleaner energy sources to create a strategic plan for modernizing operations.

“They’ve come to some of our meetings and just looked at us in awe, and have said, ‘No one else in Canada is trying to work together; everyone else is trying to buy each other out, outcompete and monopolize,’“ she says.

This collaborative spirit is key to the long-term survival of entities like AREA, according to Hodges.

“If there’s anything we’ve realized, it’s that working in silos is not sustainable, and as global pressures and supply chains continue to create chokeholds on the energy industry, we need to be working together. We all thrive together, and we all struggle together, so we might as well be working alongside each other.”

The Climate Story Network is an initiative of Climate Focus, a non-profit organization dedicated to covering stories about community-driven climate solutions.