I'll be brief. I'll start, if I may, by recapping the due diligence around the project. It's really important. Of course, Dr. Winfield is an expert on this subject, but I just want to talk about our due diligence and the due diligence that came from the independent system operator, who committee members may have a chance to speak to. I don't know the other witnesses, but I would recommend it.
Remember that power systems work through the 8,760 hours in a year, and there are some hours of the day when Ontario has long, clean power. It might be the middle of the night, the wind is blowing and demand in Ontario is low, or the nuclear plants may be running, etc. Our due diligence showed that, in those moments, there were opportunities for Ontario to economically benefit from exporting clean power to the U.S., to the largest wholesale market in the world, called PJM, the Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland market. That equated to, over the first decade of this line, seven million tonnes of GHG savings from Ontario power going to the U.S.
There are also times in the year when Ontario imports power over the line. That might be when the nuclear plants need to shut down for maintenance, when it's not windy, or when it's a particularly hot or cold day in Ontario and you need to bring power in. The IESO's modelling suggested that they would be able to buy that power from PJM in those moments and avoid turning on gas plants in those peak moments in Ontario, so there were, over that same period, the first decade of the line, four million tonnes of GHG savings in Ontario.
I take my time on that because it's important. Some people say, “Well, how can there be savings on both sides of the border?” The answer is that there are a lot of hours in a year, and sometimes the electrons are flowing one way and some the other.
However, I'm not a power market expert, and so the IESO, the Independent Electricity System Operator, that's their job. They have a pretty complicated hour-by-hour model of the Ontario power grid. That's their modelling. We hired PA Consulting, which understands power markets very well, to do due diligence on that, to scrutinize and to make sure that was in the interest of the taxpayers, and it verified that it made sense.
To answer your question, as the project restarts—and as I was saying to Dr. Lewis, this project was, yes, suspended, given costs, but it is still a very viable project over the long term—we will update that forecasting. We will again scrutinize the independent system operator's view. Certainly, as a lender to a project, it's our duty to make sure that's true. However, we are not also the power market experts, so we would hire more due diligence to do that. We would also have legal fees to finalize the contracts with whoever is the new borrower, but we would really be building on the due diligence done to date.