I can offer some of my professional background. I started my career at Powerex, the trading arm of BC Hydro, for seven years. I went to New York, and then I returned to Canada. I was head trader at TransAlta, which is Alberta's largest merchant. I'm well versed in the trading activity across the two.
There are many things that become an impediment beyond the physical act of linear infrastructure—simple things, such as scheduling timelines. In the western U.S., we schedule 60 minutes to the hour; in Alberta, schedules need to be in two hours before. We call them seams issues, and they make inefficiencies between the two. The biggest challenge for the B.C.-Alberta tie-up—as compared to, say, Saskatchewan-Manitoba, where our western transmission catalyst is already working—is market differences.
As Pierre-Olivier mentioned, in B.C. you have a Crown corporation and average cost pricing vertically integrated from generation all the way down to the retail level. In Alberta, we have a disaggregated market. We have competitive generation. We have regulated transmission and distribution and a competitive retail. That introduces a lot of complexity, because you're going to get elements of winners and losers, as in any trade, and you have a multitude of participants that you need to find some alignment on. This is in addition to the fact that you have what we call marginal cost pricing in Alberta and average cost pricing in British Columbia, and bridging that is challenging. However, that's exactly the type of thing that we're working on: those concrete details for commercial arrangements not to gloss over that really important issue.
I'll hand it over to Pierre-Olivier.