Have you seen this pair of videos about what is means for an electric grid to collapse and what it takes to bring it back up?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OpC4fH3mEk & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w
It's not about controlled shedding, the time-limited regional outages that are used to preserve an electric grid balance, but what happens after the balance is lost.
I think it's important that we all understand that:
- large outages are deadly industrial accidents, not just minor inconveniences
- it takes power to create power
- switching back on some generation capacity means also switching back on some consumers, and that's a delicate dance that requires time to ramp things up slowly
- most electrical infrastructure is remotely operated, with a limited backup capacity. Past a certain outage time, people need to be send to physically operate grid controlling devices, while transportation and communication are in a state of chaos, making the restart process exponentially more difficult and slower
- reliable and controllable power sources are key for the restart process, large hydroelectric dams are awesome for that, wind turbines are not
@miermont in 2003 there was a full blackout across most of the northeastern US. It took about three days to get power back up across the grid