Just over 20,000 Nova Scotia homes and businesses were still without power this morning after the first major snowstorm of the season.

Most of the outages were clustered along the south shore, with over 9,000 customers without power in the Lunenburg area.

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Much of the province saw 20 centimetres of heavy, wet snow fall Sunday evening and into Monday morning.

More than 120,000 customers woke up to power outages on Monday.

Nova Scotia Power has said the buildup of snow and ice can put extra weight on trees, causing them to damage power lines or poles.

The utility said icy road conditions have slowed its work to restore power.