Thank you very much for the questions, Member. I appreciate it.
There are some very obvious opportunities that were articulated as far back as the Speech from the Throne and now are in the budget that has emerged. It's very clear, based on our calculations with our transit agencies, that if you want to get to zero-emission transit technology and get to zero at the municipal level, it's going to cost about $4 billion to get to the first 5,000 and, therefore, about $12 billion to get to all 15,000. The budget did identify $2.75 billion, essentially, for ZEB technologies and, within that, the $15 billion in permanent public transit funding. There's no doubt that it is a significant way forward towards those capital investments. That has been identified.
Some of the elements within that, though, are the nuanced items that we'd like to identify, building on some of the comments already articulated. Throwing money at the problem won't necessarily solve the problem if people don't know what to buy. In the zero-emission transit world, it is complicated. It is complex from a technology standpoint and an energy system standpoint, so we have advocated for the idea that a small portion of that should go towards feasibility studies, something along the lines of a small amount such as $10 million, which doesn't sound small to a Canadian, but in the grand scheme of things and in a budget like the one we've seen, it's a relatively small amount that could be allowed for transit agencies. There are about 20 of them in Canada that need to run their feasibility studies so that they know exactly what kind of battery electric bus to buy, what kind of fuel cell bus to buy and what kind of fuel supply chain to have. That's a small amount.
We've also identified the need within that $15 billion of permanent funding, or the $2.75 billion announced for ZEB, zero-emission bus technology, for about $10 million to be allocated to data analytics. This is a new area for transit and technologies in the public fleet domain. Generally, they don't collect data in real time about the energy performance of their systems. You didn't need to when the world was diesel and you could waste energy going up a hill and accelerating, with the heating turned on. It was terrible energy efficiency, but diesel was cheap enough that you could do it.
Now you can't waste an electron and you cannot waste a hydrogen molecule because you may run out of power in the middle of the day. The only way to assess that is data analytics. The only way to do that is a small amount of funding there within that program for telemetry devices, loggers and a data analytics program for transit.
Those are some of the opportunities we foresee. The signals are positive. It's now just that the devil is in the details and the nuancing.