I can tell you that I'm responsible not only for conservation, but also for the renewable generations coming on our grid.
First of all, we're a municipal organization, and we're responsible for only the Ottawa region. So I can only speak to that.
Let me first address the issue of being, as you suggested, at the end of a feeder. This is an issue of engineering and physics. There's so much capacity you can put on any given line. If somebody is going to put a large generation on your line, then you look at the capacity that you have in your equipment, for all intents and purposes, and determine whether the equipment can handle that extra capacity. If it can't, then you have to reinforce the environment--the equipment that you have serving that area. That's the hesitation most often for people, especially in the last year or two. Generally it's a large installation that somebody wants to put up, whether it's solar or whatever, in a renewable generation. More often than not, when they're coming onto the grid, the hydro companies have had, over the past several years, a lot of capacity, but they haven't built out as much as they probably should have I think, if we look back over ten years of planning. They've used that excess capacity in their system and used it and used it. Now they're to the point where they're quite full, and as the generation starts to come on, they have a bit of a dilemma because now they have to reinforce and build excess capacity again. That's what's going on in the hydro industry.
For the residential solar rooftop, we expect in Ottawa about 5,000 customers to come online over the next three years. We're looking forward to them. They're not a big problem because they come on sporadically and in different areas. If one street comes along and everybody on the street wants to come on to the same point, then as we bulk those people up we look to make sure we can get them on the network. I think we're okay in our territory, and we expect that we're probably going to have some great success with it in Ottawa.