Thank you kindly for the question.
You raised the important question of climate change. And if we want to make a dent in climate change where we can on this continent, there's one place to do it and one place only: it's not the oil sands. The oil sands is 50 million tonnes; it's not that much. U.S. coal right now is 2 billion tonnes. That's 20 times more than the oil sands.
We have vast storehouses of hydro potential, wind potential, and pump storage potential, and it's going to remain potential unless we can get a plan together and a vision to have infrastructure in place that will get that energy to the big customer in the U.S.
The U.S. will figure out its own energy security if we don't get our game together. The U.S. has not figured out its own energy security answer to where they're going to meet the retirement of the hundreds of thousands of megawatts of coal-fired generators over the next 6 to 10 years, which the national electricity reliability corporation is projecting. The U.S. currently doesn't have an answer to where their electricity is going to be coming from to keep the lights on for millions and millions of people. We can step into that gap if we come up with a solid plan that's backed up by guarantees for the capital costs for the private sector and the public sector that would be laying down the infrastructure. It could be a P3.
The former chairman of SNC-Lavalin—I know they're not in vogue these days—Jacques Lamarre, put forward a proposal that he thought would make sense if you had provinces as 50% owners in a national type of grid for bulk electricity exports, with the private sector and citizens as part owners. It's a publicly held company. There is a lot of potential for that kind of a structure.
In terms of concrete recommendations, the first thing is that the National Energy Board make a map and show what our clean electricity generation potential is from an engineering perspective, and show what the export value is for each province of clean electricity to the United States and within Canada, interjurisdictionally.
Number two, give loan guarantees to large capital projects that will enhance our transmission infrastructure.
Number three, come up with a plan with the National Energy Board to investigate and show how the massive hundreds of thousands of kilometres of pipeline corridors could be co-located with superconductive transmission lines. EPRI has done a lot of work on this. Germany and China are looking at this; Canada is not. It's a big potential. If we could use those corridors, the biggest barrier to building the infrastructure to get the electricity to market is NIMBYism. People don't like the giant rights-of-way.
With the new technology that exists with the superconductive electricity grids, you can fit these power lines, literally, within old pipelines. You only need a 25-foot right-of-way. It holds massive potential to investigate for the National Energy Board—a game changer.
One last recommendation is the potential to make the biggest storage battery in the world, by taking advantage of the pump storage potential of the Niagara region, where there's a 99-metre difference between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. It would have to happen with the Canadian government saying it's okay to change the water height in Lake Ontario by up to 29 centimetres. That's how much it would change. It already varies by up to 25 centimetres just through regular ebbs and flows. That's what would happen. But it would be a massive battery that could store all that wind blowing when people don't need it. And then you can sell it to the market when the market wants it and is hungry and will pay for it.
