Let me take a crack at that to start.
When you're talking about forms of generation, we need to bear in mind that all forms of electricity generation have different characteristics. They have different strengths and weaknesses. One of the strengths of our country is that we have all of them. When we're building a grid, we need to balance that out.
Obviously, if you look at B.C. or Manitoba, they've developed hydro, because they have a lot of it. Ontario used most of its hydro, accessible hydro, and went to nuclear. You use the kinds of assets you have.
Going forward, and let me just kind of talk about my own industry for a minute, I would say two things. In the province of Ontario, we've undertaken a massive refurbishment project. We're refurbishing the Darlington and Bruce units. They will continue to supply somewhere in the vicinity of 60% of Ontario's electricity to 2060. That's largely because there is no form of new generation that is cheaper than refurbishing existing generation. That's the approach we've taken there.
There are a couple of things that my industry is working on that we're hoping will have some impacts. One is in the context of something we call small modular reactors. Small modular reactors can break down into two different sizes or reactors. There are reactors that are anywhere from 50 megawatts to 200 megawatts, which are actually designed to be connected to the grid, and largely looking at replacing fossil fuel generation. But there's another category that we're working on called the very small modular reactors.
These are things that are in the 5 to10 megawatt range. I should have actually mentioned this to the member from Labrador last time. The hope behind them is that they're specifically designed to go into small off-grid communities, and be able to supply steady power there and replace diesel. That's a targeted goal.
I wouldn't want to tell you we're going to get there overnight. One of the things about the nuclear industry is that we don't do anything real quick. Our national lab at Chalk River has just launched a program to research some of those with a view to building a prototype. We're hoping that sometime in the next decade we might be able to move something like that forward. I know that's not a good answer to the people who are relying on diesel right now, but that's one of the things that we're doing.
Again, I would just talk about the need to use interties for what they can give us in terms of stability and in terms of providing support and reliability. I'm not convinced that transporting thousands of megawatts of electricity across long distances is economically viable at this point, which is not to say it won't be somewhere down the road, but we should understand that interties are an important asset. They're important to stability and reliability, and need to be connected in multiple locations in multiple jurisdictions.