just got out the shower taking my lab coat sledding Alberta had an insane weekend just look at this Bonkers weather map from Sunday temperatures in Theus 30s minus 40s smashing records up and down the province for this time of year and let's all spare a thought for the poor people in keg River it's a small farming Community about a 7-hour Drive Northwest of Ed they recorded a low on Sunday of - 50.6 de -50 and if you're wondering whether that's Celsius or Fahrenheit it doesn't even matter because we're basically at the point where the two scales converge Min -50° C- 59 F that's the coldest it's been in Alberta in the last 20 years one of the coldest places on the planet at that exact moment in time and it's the temperature at which instant noodles start to do [Music] this so as the weekend approached the warnings were all over the news brace for a dangerous deep freeze bone chilling temperatures severe weather breaking records and sure enough it's cold Jesus I'm pretty sure it's close to my 50 we don't want to go out there this they start setting all kinds of community records in some cases hitting pure cold the way they haven't seen in more than a hundred years but there's a real health and safety risk here because if you run out of power during a minus 50° deep freeze as in you have unreliable heat then people could literally freeze to death and the operator of Alberta's electrical grid is starting to see a problem their social account hadn't posted in months months but at 11:35 a.m. Friday morning they write demand for electricity in Alberta hit a new hourly peak of 12,384 megaw on Thursday we can see from their most recent supply and demand report which is a beast of a document by the way that this exceeds what they generate as in at this point they're in a power deficit even now they're having to draw on reserves Alberta's total capacity to produce um is around it's just over 20 GW however you have to keep in mind how the grid is designed and how it's designed to run right it's never expected that all of that generation is going to be available at any given time at one point Reserve power was down to 10 megaw which is like having this much water in a bucket that's supposed to be full they were forecasting being hundreds of megawatts in the whole even after using all of their backup reserves so an emergency alert is issued this uh went out to the the phones across the province this uh warning of high-risk rotating power outages 6:44 p.m. Saturday extreme cold resulting in high power demand has placed the Alberta Grid at a high risk of rotating power outages this evening albertans are asked to cut their consumption turn off anything you're not using use your microwave instead of your stove don't start that load of laundry maybe don't charge your car right now and who would have guessed it [Music] worked it was a tremendous response by Alberton um we really really appreciate it um and so that really made the difference on CBC radio's Daybreak Alberta Sunday morning we heard from the electrical operator how in real time they saw a drop in power demand it immediately fell by 100 megawatt and then a couple minutes later it fell another 100 megawatt so a 200 megawatt drop and and that got us through um what we call the the the hump Saskatchewan also managed to send power Alberta's way another 153 megawatt to help with the shortage all of that was enough to avoid having to resort to Rolling blackouts but today Alberto's by no means Out of the Woods Monday was another day of record cold temperatures The Province continues to be at the mercy of low wind which really cuts into how much wind power you can generate and at least two natural gas plants are under delivering right now one due to maintenance the other just offline altogether and so it's kind of the the combination of all of those things uh coming together at the same time that produce that tightness and it should go without saying any Province dealing with temperatures this far into the negatives has to cope with very real health risks frostbite and hypothermia are the biggest dangers and think about the homeless I just wish like there's more things for people out there for for housing and stuff one nonprofit in Edmonton which normally doesn't offer overnight Services they plan to take in 50 people as an exception over the weekend on Thursday they had 137 Friday 187 and Saturday 230 it's been a pretty significantly higher number than we had anticipated and and certainly our team has felt um you know the pressure of that as has the Community as we've tried to make sure that we're getting everyone in they told CBC they haven't turned anyone away that's a lot of humanity for what are very inhumane temperatures and here's the hoping next weekend goes a lot more smoothly it's supposed to get a lot [Music] warmer