> It is hard to fathom the devastation a total shutdown would have wreaked. […] “What my team and the folks at the utilities in Texas would be doing is an exercise called ‘black start,’ ” he said. A black start would have required carefully rebooting a few power plants at a time and using them to jump-start others, thereby restoring the grid piece by piece. […] No one knows how long that process would take, because no one has ever needed to do it. Magness said it would have been weeks at least.

Why weeks? I “survived” the “great” northeast blackout and most areas were back up in 16-48 hours. And that involved a bigger network across multiple jurisdictions.