Excellent. I'll speak to that. Secondly, I'll make a public service announcement. The various organizations with which I've spent time have asked me to make sure that you understand that these are my views, and not necessarily the views of Hydro One or the Independent Electricity System Operator in Ontario.
With that out of the way, I really just have two quick points to make.
The first is in relation to the map. When you ask an electricity person how they see the world, this is how we see the world. There are three big pieces: the eastern interconnect, which includes Quebec; Texas; and the western interconnect. This is what North America looks like to us. It probably looks strange to you because, really, our system is interconnected on the eastern interconnect between Attawapiskat in the north and Key West in the south. Since electrons travel at the speed of light, anything that happens on the way through, whether it's some squirrel getting into a generator in Miami or whether it's a snow event up in Canada's far north, will be instantly seen by a whole bunch of control room operators as it happens. They may not find out what happened for another three months. It's really quite a marvel of engineering.
In that view of the world—eastern interconnect, western interconnect, and Texas—you'll notice the geographic boundaries that you're used to seeing for political geography, the states, the provinces, and that. Electricity is carried over those boundaries by interties. Just a fundamental principle is that most of these systems are built to be self-sufficient within a sovereign entity, but are interconnected through interties.
I thought today part of the discussion that you wanted to have was about the value of the interties. I'm not going to drone on and on because there seemed to be a lot of different topics and a lot of different manifestations about that, but I will make two obvious points about this map. The first is that the eastern interconnect is not interconnected with the western interconnect, neither in the United States nor in Canada. That's a glaring observation. Marvin addressed it a little bit, but we've never really looked seriously as a country at interconnecting our own country.
That would have advantages for Canada. It would also be an interesting market play because if we interconnected, Canada that would be the only route of interconnection between the eastern and the western United States. Texas is down doing its own thing for a lot of interesting and amusing historical reasons, which we can get into in question period if you care, but it's kind of glaring. Maybe what I will do at this point is just stop with the map, and then if people have questions on it we can get into it.
Let me make a second point. The electrons themselves that move around at the speed of light and power our lights and power everything that we do are actually technology agnostic. They're technology neutral. They don't care whether they were made in a nuclear reactor, a photovoltaic cell, even a chemical interaction in a battery. The commodity is utterly fungible. I know of no other commodity that can be made so many different ways. Steel can't be made this many different ways. It's quite remarkable.
But the electrons themselves are technology neutral. We all have different endowments in our jurisdictions. We all have different biases in terms of public policy about the way those electrons are manufactured. Once that happens, the interties and the system don't care how they were manufactured. They flow at the speed of light over copper wire and end up where they're supposed to end up.
Most of the tension that happens between the political jurisdictions and the electrical countries that those jurisdictions live in, from a policy point of view, whether it's clean energy, whether it's wind, solar, thermal, coal, gas, biomass, hydraulic, whatever the technology that makes it is, happens within the sovereign realms of, oftentimes, provinces and states. In the United States, there is a more federal jurisdiction than there is in Canada, but all these things overlay on that. Fuel mix is really quite diverse even within these jurisdictions, but once an electron is made, it moves, and it moves over the interties.
Maybe, Mr. Chair, having made those two points, I'll just wait until question period.