Right now there are five transmission lines that connect the provinces. They're generally at a 230,000-volt capability. To add one more line of that size to increase our export capability by 100 megawatts would cost a couple of hundred million dollars. A 500-kilovolt line that might allow us to transfer another 900 megawatts from Manitoba to Saskatchewan is probably in the order of a billion dollars.
A small project is $200 million, a big project is a billion dollars, and half of it is in Manitoba and half of it is in Saskatchewan. You need to have an investment of a half a billion dollars in Manitoba to help Saskatchewan gain access to the large volumes of surplus.
A 900-megawatt transmission line to Saskatchewan would only divert a small portion of the surplus energy that is now going into the United States. For us to divert all the surplus that's going into the United States and keep all those emission reduction benefits in Canada would require several large interconnections of a 500,000 voltage so the capacity is there to move Manitoba's surplus into Saskatchewan and divert it from the United States.
You're talking potentially billions of dollars of infrastructure investment. As I mentioned in my testimony, Saskatchewan has lots of renewable options on its own. It has a very strong wind resource, it has solar, and it has its own hydro, so the way to achieve their goal at least cost.... It may be just too expensive to invest in that transmission on its own. It would tend to invest in its local options, and it would then remain essentially isolated from the rest of the North American grid.
If it's thinking of investing in several thousand megawatts of wind and managing that wind variability, it will do that on its own. It doesn't have access to hydro storage or to the market to manage its surplus, so not only do these large transmission lines give it access to our surplus, but they help us manage the variability as it develops its own local renewable resources.
In the 1960s and 1970s our interconnections with the United States transformed Manitoba from essentially being an island that was isolated from the North American grid into one where we are a key participant in the North American electricity marketplace. The same kind of transformation would occur with Saskatchewan. It would not then just be dependent on its local options. There could be market solutions to a lot of the problems that it's facing. The funding by the federal government would help it achieve that integration into the North American grid.