At my previous full-time role I worked on a simulator for just these sorts of black start events. The US has come very close to having regional outages of this scale several times in the last decade, and our black start capability is largely untested to my knowledge (by which I mean largely untested in real-world scenarios).

Spain is about to face the challenge of a “black start”
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/why-restarting-a-power-grid-is-so-hard/

#ElectricPower #power #PowerGrid #BlackStart

Part of our energy problem here in the US: you could toast a slice of bread over a small burning stick. Given there's a healthy enough forest nearby, these regenerate and you'd effectively never run out. However, most of us have an appliance that uses so much electric power it'd take an Olympic athlete feverishly running a manual generator for the duration of the toasting process to generate it. We're needlessly substituting an elite energy slave for a stick when we make toast because we can and because the structure of things encourages it.

#economics #degrowth #ElectricPower #EnergyBlindness