On the first point, with respect to the vegetation in the trees that may be flooded, with respect to the developments, I have just a couple of quick points.
Regarding the size of the reservoir, you can look in comparison to, say, the upper Churchill, which I think was in around the 5,000- to 6,000-square-kilometre reservoir up there, many years ago. The order of magnitude we're into is a 50- to 80-square-kilometre reservoir size, so it's very much smaller compared to what's up north. Why are we limited to that? Down river, where Gull and Muskrat are, they're in essence in a valley kind of arrangement. So what's happening is that you're filling up a valley, it's not spreading this way, it's coming up. What limits us, then, is that eventually you push back to the tailrace of the upper Churchill. So we're limited in how far we can go because you would end up flooding lower Churchill if you did more. Engineering-wise, we are limited to a much smaller environmental footprint. There is an environmental footprint with respect to the flooding, we admit that.
With respect to how we're going to handle the vegetation piece, that is part of what is under study this summer. There are obviously two ways to do it. You could cut the vegetation, cut the trees, and harvest the trees and vegetation, or potentially leave them there, depending on what the emissions situation looked like. That's what's being investigated. I don't have an answer for that just yet, but it will come out in the environmental process. One thing we have to consider in addition is safety. A lot of these trees are on very steep banks, so part of the analysis is what we will do with respect to trading off the safety of people who may be involved in cutting this as opposed to what would be acceptable from an environmental perspective. It's under heavy study, but we don't have all of the answers on that just yet.
With respect to energy savings, there have been a number of initiatives, and it depends on jurisdiction, I think. We've had some success, primarily with some programs aimed at lighting replacement and encouraging energy-efficient appliances. On the lighting side, we did a pilot project, in one of our remote communities again, where we handed out CFLs to everyone in the community. It was a pilot case, and I can't really project this to every jurisdiction, but we had a payback of less than one year on that program. Everyone took us up on it; it was displacing the expensive diesel, but our analysis showed us we had a payback of less than a year. So we're very excited about pursuing that on the rest of the coastal areas.
Newfoundland and Labrador has stepped up to the plate over the last year, and we've realized in our province that we're doing lots of things in various entities, government and private. We took a look at all of that and said, look, there's lots of good work, lots of great people, and lots of money in different pockets, and we've taken an approach that we've invested half a million dollars this year to bring all those groups together, taking the lead to say we don't want to control this, we just want to coordinate our efforts. And that's in the process of being done.
In addition to that, we've commissioned a study to learn something from many of our neighbours who have been much more successful at this than we have, because we know from our basic research that some things work very well and some things have been wasted. We've also learned that apparently there's a limit to how far it can go. Apparently, everyone seems to get the first 5% to 7% of savings, and we're finding in our studies that as people pour more money into it after that, it's harder to get to the next level.
From Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro's perspective, we are saying that we want a study to itemize the learnings from everywhere else—that's due in September—and based upon that study, we're going to put together a program that's very targeted, and coordinate everybody and come up with something where we hope we can learn from others. That's in the works as well.
You mentioned federal support. What are we looking for? With all respect, we don't like the term “federal support”. As I mentioned earlier, we believe that this is such a great project that it's an investment opportunity for the federal government. We welcome discussions, but as I said before, there's a tremendous amount of companies, individuals, funds looking to invest in this project for financial reasons. I think the federal government has—as you mentioned—an added benefit in that they're looking to invest in greenhouse gas emission reductions, and this is a gift. It's a gift. It's there. It's 2,800 megawatts. It could displace 50% of the GHG emissions created by Ontario's electricity generation sector. Ontario creates about 29 to 30 tonnes of GHG emissions from electricity generation every year. If you look at our project from a coal perspective, we can take 16 to 17 tonnes of that out of it immediately, as soon as we flick the switch.
So this is an investment opportunity. There's no question about it. What do we want? Basically we want the federal government to take a look at our business case and see how well it benefits them and to say to us that this is an opportunity they can't avoid and that they would like to invest. At that point, having shown them the business case, having indicated to them where we may have some suggestions—I haven't built that yet, but when we build it—on how they can maximize their investment, when we come up, we'd like to give the federal government some investment options. Hopefully they'll be excited about that at that time.
We haven't got the business case sorted out in such a way that we can sell our product in the best fashion, but that's what we're intending to do, and it won't be very long. We're very close.
