You're actually touching on a subject that I am trying to learn a little bit about, as well. Let me give a small example in Nova Scotia.
Normally, on small solar installations, photovoltaics installations, it reports back on the net. It's reported back that my installation sold 100 kilowatts of electricity into the grid more than it used from the grid, so it's a net. To actually understand what's happening on that, you'd really like to know, back and forth in any given hour, whether it is producing for the home or producing for the network. You'd want some recording of that, so you could then analyze this dynamic and understand more about when that little solar installation is actually contributing or drawing, so you can design a better system.
In Nova Scotia we didn't have any way of getting to that, except in 2015 when we revised our Electricity Act and just said that people are going to get a benefit from the system by doing net metering; what they will have to contribute for getting that benefit is that they will have to install a meter that will tell exactly what's going on, back and forth, and it will be reported back. We had to write that into law, had to actually say that was it.
Nobody minded. All the people who were doing solar PV were the committed people who probably would share all of their data with anybody all the time. What Nova Scotia now has is this requirement to collect all this information up to now, so that five years later, by 2020, it's able to start making some really subtle decisions about the future design and what is going to be the impact if it goes from hundreds to thousands, to tens of thousands.
One other thing that needs to be looked at is whether we are collecting the information we want to make those decisions, and whether there is technology that we can require that will not put a real big burden on anybody, but just report out. That was the case of what we did there, and I know there are technologies and ways of doing it. But you need some people who are thinking about that, too, because that's in the policy area. That's not in the Stats Canada collection.