In the sense that this has been looked at a lot of different times, I think the most recent iteration of a full east-west tie was back in 2005. TransCanada had done a study and was trying to rally some support for a full trans-Canada tie. We're not that far away.
Ontario is interconnected with a 115-kilovolt line into Manitoba, and I believe Alberta is interconnected up north with Saskatchewan. In theory, it's not difficult to create one. The question is how big the thing should be if you want to do a trans-Canada tie. I think to meaningfully affect the electrical flows, it would have to be quite big. The other gentlemen will have a valid opinion. I'd throw a number of 4,000 megawatts on it. The opportunity for us to do things interprovincially as opposed to doing them north-south, like we've been doing, is to try to follow our peak load across the country as dinnertime moves across the country, because that's when our electrical peak is.
I'll assume that there are no ringers in the room there, but the systems really do expand and contract depending on the time of day. I'll speak to the Ontario system because I know it the best. At night we're consuming about 10,000 megawatts. On a hot air conditioner day this past summer, we were at 21,000 megawatts. That pulse of doubling our effective capacity every single day continues all the way through the seasons. In Quebec it's even more dramatic because in the middle of winter they have most of their heating on baseboards, so their electrical peak is very high. I don't know the characteristics of the western system as well as I should. Certainly Marvin would be able to tell us what goes on in B.C.
I think the opportunity, if we're going to do it, has to be a significant opportunity to move it east-west. We know our interconnection is north-south, both in the western part of the country and the eastern part of the country, which are very big, and we know we have generally a ready market for our electrons down in the United States. The question would be, is it worth interconnecting in a meaningful way east-west?