[Cryptography] Smart electricity meters can be dangerously insecure, warns expert

[John Levine]

>I can't help with that, but I have further hearsay evidence. A number of years ago, I spent a week working on
>some modeling problem related to the UK electrical grid, and an engineer I talked to at the time told me that
>nobody really knows how to restart the grid if it crashes. Or more precisely, it has never been tried.

I've read stories about how power is rebooted after large blackouts in
the US, since generating plants generally require power from somewhere
else to start up.  Wikipedia notes that in the 1965 northeast blackout,
western New York was rebooted starting with a power plant at Kodak in
Rochester that kept running.  I read that in Boston, the reboot started
with a generator in a lab at MIT.

Somewhat informative Wikipedia article, with mentions of startup arrangements in the UK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start

R's,
John