Nova Scotia Light and Power Company, Limited (NSLP) was a Canadian electric and gas utility company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The company still exists as a shell but is no longer active; however, for more than a century, it was the major producer of energy in the province of Nova Scotia, and its largest public transit operator.
Origins
NSLP marked as its origin June 11, 1866, and the inauguration of street railway services in Halifax, by the Halifax City Railroad Company (HCR).NSLP Annual Report, 1966. The date is somewhat arbitrary, likely chosen for its public relations value in the year before the country’s much-anticipated 1967 centennial. HCR was only one of several component parts of NSLP, and was actually chartered in 1863.
However, the antecedents of the company go back even farther, to March, 1840 and the charter of the Halifax Gas Light and Water Company, later renamed the Halifax Gas Light Company (HGL).Bye laws, rules and ordinances, of the Halifax Gas Light and Water Company. In Public Archives of Nova Scotia. The company's directors included Edward Cunard, third son of shipping magnate Samuel Cunard.Full text of "Act of incorporation, and acts in amendment thereof, and bye-laws, rules & ordinances of the Halifax Gas Light Company [microform]" By 1843, HGL was producing coal gas and distributing it via underground pipes to 281 stores and businesses in downtown Halifax.NSLP Annual Report, 1950
Halifax businessman William D. O'Brien chartered HCR in 1863, beginning operations three years later with five horse-drawn tram cars. HCR suspended operations after ten years; but in 1886 a new company, the Halifax Street Railway Company, purchased the remaining HCR assets and resumed horse-powered operations.Canadian Railroad Historical Association Bulletin 17 (1954) http://www.exporail.org/can_rail/Canadian%20Rail_CRHA_Bulletin_no17_April_1954.pdf
In 1885, Halifax industrialist John Starr launched the Halifax Electric Light Company (limited), opening the city's first electric generation plant, a 70 kW facility located at Black's Wharf, near the corner of Lower Water and Prince Streets. Two years later, HGL purchased Starr's firm.Industrial Canada, May, 1967 https://web.archive.org/web/20060111095136/http://www.lib.uwo.ca/business/ccc-novascotialight.htm
In 1889, a group of investors including Charles Annand, publisher of the Morning Chronicle newspaper, founded the Nova Scotia Power Company, Limited, taking over street railway operations with the intention of electrifying them; however, the firm was undercapitalized and was unable to build a generating station.Industrial Canada, May, 1967 https://web.archive.org/web/20060111095136/http://www.lib.uwo.ca/business/ccc-novascotialight.htm
In 1893, Halifax lawyer Benjamin Franklin Pearson launched a second gas-producing firm, the People's Heat and Light Company. In 1897, the company took over HGL.Industrial Canada, May, 1967 https://web.archive.org/web/20060111095136/http://www.lib.uwo.ca/business/ccc-novascotialight.htm Pearson, with significant holdings in the Nova Scotia coal industry, saw the future in electric power and with three partners incorporated the Halifax Electric Tramway Company Limited on March 20, 1895.Marchildon, G.P., "Pearson, Benjamin Franklin", in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/pearson_benjamin_franklin_14E.html The company took over the operations of the Nova Scotia Power Company and then, in 1902, the People's Heat and Light Company. In 1917, the consolidated company became Nova Scotia Tramways and Power Company Limited; finally, in 1928, the company was reorganized as Nova Scotia Light and Power Company, Limited.Industrial Canada, May, 1967 https://web.archive.org/web/20060111095136/http://www.lib.uwo.ca/business/ccc-novascotialight.htm
Ownership
In 1919, Stone & Webster, a Boston-based engineering firm with interests in a number of North American electric utilities, purchased controlling interest in the company. In 1924, the firm sold its interest to Royal Securities Corporation, the brokerage house headed by Nova Scotia financier Izaak Walton Killam. Royal Securities widely sold shares in the company to the public at large and, in later years, NSLP used its broad ownership base as a public relations tool. By 1970, NSLP was owned by 10,785 stockholders; 6273 of them were women. Company directors held only 1.6 per cent of the stock.NSLP Annual Report, 1970 The top ten investors combined held less than 16 per cent of the company's shares.NSLP Annual Report, 1969
Lt.-Col. John Crerar (Jack) MacKeen (1898-1972), a prominent Nova Scotia businessman and Killam protege, led NSLP for its last four decades. He served as president starting in 1931, before assuming the title of chairman of the board in 1961, a post he held until January 1972, nine months before his death. He was succeeded as president by W.N. Wickwire QC; however Wickwire died on August 24, 1962, after only a year in office. The company's general manager, A. Russell Harrington (1914-2006), assumed the president's title in 1962 and held both jobs until the company's takeover in 1972.NSLP Annual Reports
Expansion
From its modest beginnings, with a single 70 kW generating plant powering a small area of central Halifax, the growth of the company's electrical generation capacity was steady and significant over the years. When NSLP ceased operations in January 1972, it was producing 1.82 million net kilowatt hours, through a network of three thermal generating stations and 15 hydro stations, in addition to its connections to the interprovincial power grid.NSLP Annual Report, 1971
In 1902, the company commissioned a new 1000 kW coal-fired thermal generating station on Lower Water Street, near the corner of Morris Street.NSLP Annual Report, 1966 NSLP continued to grow its capacity, both with frequent expansions of the Halifax plant, construction of hydro generating plants in rural areas, and acquisitions of smaller companies throughout rural Nova Scotia. The first of these, in 1929, was the Avon River Power Company, which served the Town of Windsor and other parts of the Annapolis Valley. Under its Avon River subsidiary, NSLP continued to acquire small and municipally owned systems in Annapolis, Kings and Hants counties over the next few decades. The company also took over companies in eastern Lunenburg, Queens, Yarmouth and northern Nova Scotia.Electric power companies in Nova Scotia: https://web.archive.org/web/20190516024442/http://ns1758.ca/electric/electric.html#avon-river Archived 2016 from: http://ns1758.ca/electric/electric.html#avon-river
In 1935, NSLP took over the operations of the Dartmouth Gas & Electric Light & Heating & Power Company Limited, having laid its first underwater cable across the Halifax Harbour to Dartmouth in 1917.NSLP: The eastern Canadian port: Now it can be told! (1946)
At the time the company adopted the NSLP name in 1928, its electric operations served about 20,000 customers with 600 miles of lines; by 1948, the number of customers had tripled, and line-miles had quadrupled to 2400 miles.NSLP Annual Report, 1948
NSLP continued to produce gas exclusively from Nova Scotia-mined coal, opening a new gas plant on Lower Water Street in 1917. The final expansion of gas operations occurred in 1942, and in 1948 the system added its last major customer, supplying gas to the new Victoria General Hospital in Halifax.NSLP Annual Report, 1948 In the post-war period, gas production remained mostly steady between 190 and 200 million cubic feet per year, but rising coal and labour costs made the operation only marginally profitable. Efforts to sell the division failed. The gas system was abandoned in 1953 and all gas lines under Halifax streets were purged.NSLP Annual Report, 1953
Beginning in the late 1920s, NSLP began an aggressive program of rural electrification, designed to bring electric service to remote areas of the province then without access to the NSLP system or the Crown-owned Nova Scotia Power Commission (NSPC). The program was slowed by the depression, then halted in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II but resumed in 1945. During the post-war period the company built more than 1300 miles of new line and added almost 9000 new rural customers. It declared the program largely completed by 1951.NSLP Annual Report, 1951
The company's major thermal generating station, on Lower Water Street in Halifax, was expanded several times over the years, the last being a 90,000 kW addition in 1956. It continued to operate until 1986 and was formally decommissioned in 1992. But as early as 1954 the company recognized the demand for power would exceed the capacity of the plant, and announced it was planning to construct a new 100,000 kW facility at Tufts Cove in Dartmouth. That plant, designed to burn both coal and oil, began producing power in 1965. Within four years work had begun to double the capacity of the Tufts Cove Generating Station.NSLP annual reports
Other major post-war projects included hydro projects on the Black River (1953) and at Lequille (1968). The latter was built to replicate an historic grist mill on the site of North America's first such mill in 1607, and dedicated to Canada's Centennial. When it was opened, in a lavish ceremony featuring costumed Indigenous and European re-enactors, Nova Scotia Lieutenant Governor Victor deB. Oland praised the company as "a very good corporate citizen."NSLP annual report, 1968
In 1956, NSLP commissioned at its own expense a pair of studies into the viability of commercial tidal power development at the head of the Bay of Fundy. The two studies, by Stone & Webster and by Montreal Engineering Company, independently concluded that millions of horsepower could be harnessed from Fundy but that development costs would be commercially prohibitive at that time.NSLP Annual Report, 1956 Successor Nova Scotia Power opened North America's first tidal power installation on the Bay of Fundy in 1984.Nova Scotia Power (2015). Annapolis Tidal Station: http://www.nspower.ca/en/home/about-us/how-we-make-electricity/renewable-electricity/annapolis-tidal-station.aspx
NSLP promoted the use of electric power to consumers by opening a chain of retail stores in 1951, marketing both household and commercial appliances. The retail program was intended to “create and stimulate public acceptance of electric appliances” NSLP Annual Report, 1951 and featured “nationally known lines” of water heaters, dishwashers, dryers and other products not yet in wide use.NSLP Annual Report, 1952 The chain's flagship store was prominently located in Halifax, in the Capitol Theatre building at the corner of Spring Garden Road and Barrington Street, also home to the company's head offices. Other stores were located in Dartmouth, on Portland Street at Prince, and in the towns of Windsor, Chester and Yarmouth. New appliance showrooms were opened as late as 1969, in Halifax's Scotia Square mall and in Greenwood in the Annapolis Valley. The retail operation added almost $1.5 million to the company's bottom line that year.NSLP Annual Report, 1969
In 1971, the last full year of its independent existence, NSLP employed 1001 employees, compared to 1168 in 1969. The reduction was the result of the wind-up of the company's transit operations. Employment levels were consistent between 1100 and 1200 for the previous two decades.NSLP annual reports
Transit services
NSLP's original business line was public transportation, and the company continued to operate transit services in Halifax until 1969, when it transferred operations to the City of Halifax.
The Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, Sir William Fenwick Williams, rode the first horse-drawn car from Government House to the Richmond railway station on June 11, 1866.Nova Scotia Light and Power Company Limited Annual Report, 1966