Thank you for your question.
I think my answer is very similar to Mr. Cleland's. Every lost electron represents money; therefore, the companies are extremely focused on being efficient in terms of the transmission, the generation, and the distribution of electricity.
That is not to say that the systems, the transmission systems and the distribution systems, are as efficient as they can be made. They must be upgraded. Most of the research and development in this area is done globally. The companies who supply equipment tend to be big multinational companies with very large research budgets. The utilities have some capacity to do research in this area, and Hydro-Québec is the leading example of that. So they add their know-how to the mix in optimizing how systems operate.
What we find is that there is a balance at some point between connecting very large areas to ever more remote generation sites, between the losses that are unavoidable even with increasingly efficient generation and transmission systems and the benefits of having this wider interconnection that will allow you to optimize the overall generation resources within a large interconnected system.
To give you an example of that, Quebec is a prime storage medium for northeastern North America, by storing water at night and bringing in power from other sources at night, at very, very low cost, and then returning that power during the day for the benefit of all participants within that market area.
A second benefit is the reserve margins that you heard about earlier. If you have a relatively large interconnected area, 15% reserve margins are adequate because the contingencies that you have to deal with, with one plant going out somewhere, are spread over a larger set of resources. So you can run the system and optimize it more efficiently at lower levels of reserves in a large interconnected market than you could if you were a small market, where if one plant went out suddenly you'd have a big problem.
So there's a complex balancing, and as someone who's only had 25 years in this business, I still don't fully understand how the engineering and the sophistication of all this is done, but it's a remarkable real-time machine that keeps the lights on 24 hours a day.
I hope I've answered your question, but I'm happy to take a supplementary.