a normal morning at jun's Bakery requires a lot of power just before 9: uh everything was shut down like boom okay what's going on like start panicking the bakery lost its power so did 20,000 other people across the city with no ovens and no fridges some treats went bad we had to call customers up and be like you know kiwi delay your pick up time and all that some of them understood some of them 30 minute rolling outages hit after epcore was directed by Alberta's Electric System operator to reduce power consumption a grid alert was issued across Alberta the second this week it's not something um it's not the first thing in our toolbox that we use and it's not something we take lightly Asos says it was a perfect storm of problems Friday morning a power station went offline very little solar and wind generation a natural gas power plant failed on Wednesday evening a similar issue forced a different grid alert ASO says it has to work on its mitigation measures there's always opportunity to learn and improve from these types of things um because there is that variability of the Sun and wind we continue to try to do our best to ensure that we've got the right amount of Supply to mitigate when we we don't have that in place Alberta's former utility consumer Advocate David Gray says one problem we face is not paying for standby capacity ramping it up takes a bit of time we don't have enough back up thermal generation on our system and that's because of the way we've designed our Market Premier Danielle Smith says wind and solar should be the backup though we've built the system completely backwards and that's what we have been identifying as a problem that we need to build the system based on Basel load power a debate that's now led to two alerts in a week and some Rising frustrations Jasmine King Global News