Natural Resources committee  I'll add one more thing. Renewables are a good possibility. The one issue they deal with in the north is that winter is their heaviest load because they have heating load as well as lighting and everything else. There's not much daylight for things like solar. They have to have m

Natural Resources committee  The cost would be significant to do that for the amount of generation and load that we have in the north right now. For today, because of the small amount of load and generation we have, the AC system is okay. The losses aren't that high, but if we were to put in large amounts in

Natural Resources committee  That's correct. Typically, our transmission system would have maybe a 5% to 6% loss in the south part of the province.

Natural Resources committee  The system is AC, and yes, there's a substantial difference between the AC and DC systems. DC systems have very little loss. That's why, if they're going long distances, a lot of the utilities, such as Manitoba's and Quebec's, have DC lines. With very little loss, they can move

Natural Resources committee  First, as we're replacing aging assets on the distribution side, we're looking especially at how we modernize the grid, so we're putting in equipment at the same time to facilitate that. It's a cost-effective way of introducing this new technology into our distribution system. A

Natural Resources committee  In terms of the other barriers we have, from a technical point of view, if you install a generating plant within your own system, you can put it by a load and it will help keep the whole system stable. As soon as you start to bring power in from a fair distance away, its ability

Natural Resources committee  If you look across the north part of Saskatchewan, we have an 1,100-kilometre transmission line that ties those northern communities and some small hydro sites to the mines and the people who live up there. We looked at bringing some power in from the Northwest Territories, and a

Natural Resources committee  It's 1,100 kilometres.

Natural Resources committee  It would be from a couple of hundred kilometres into the Northwest Territories.

Natural Resources committee  This line is 138,000 volts. If you went to a higher voltage, you would have less loss and you could transport more power, but you're probably looking at about a 40% loss of energy.

Natural Resources committee  Yes.