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We Publish the Bad News Too

Nova Scotia's program closing. Alberta's near-zero uptake. California's waitlists. Most of our competitors don't write about any of it.

By Sam Menard · Updated August 2026 · 5 min read

The incentive problem in this industry

Most sites covering home energy rebates are run by installers, or paid by installers, or exist to generate installer leads. That creates a quiet bias: nobody wants to publish "this program is worse than it looks" content, because it doesn't drive the sale that pays the bills.

What that looks like in practice

We found dozens of pages still describing Nova Scotia's heat pump rebate as "the most generous in Canada" — a claim that stopped being true on December 31, 2025. We found California solar content quoting HEEHRA numbers as if the program were still accepting applications, when it's been fully reserved since February 2026. We found an Alberta rebate landscape that gets described as "solid" by sites that never checked whether the money was actually flowing (16 applications, 1 grant, province-wide).

Why we do it differently

HomePowerRebate doesn't sell installer leads to the highest bidder, and we're not paid by any utility or program to promote it. That means we can publish "this rebate closed" content with the same energy we publish "this rebate is generous" content — because our business doesn't depend on either answer being the exciting one.

The result: a ranking of every province we cover that's honest about the ones near the bottom, and city pages that say "no rebate found" instead of inventing a number to fill a blank card.

More of our story

Sources referenced in this piece were gathered during HomePowerRebate's ongoing province/state rebate research (August 2026), including government program pages, utility program pages, and news coverage (CBS Boston, Boston Globe) where cited inline.

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