[anderiv]

I do know that many plants which require power to bootstrap themselves maintain emergency generation facilities (with battery backup for the diesel/natural gas engine starters). Hopefully there's a sufficient number of these to make the "dark start" issue not much of a concern.

[Sebb767]

The big problem with a dark start is bringing the grid back up (syncing frequency, overcoming initial load, calculating the load on specific lines ...). Jumpstarting a few plants is going to be the easy part.

There was a great talk on this on the 32C3; unfortunately only in German: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7323-wie_man_einen_blackout_veru...

[jamincan]

I know that in Ontario, the Bruce Nuclear Plant (with about 8GW capacity) is designed to run indefinitely through a power outage and did during the Northeast blackout in 2003. I assume that sort of power would be enough to bootstrap the grid in Ontario.

[Havoc]

Some can bootstrap yes, but it's still a giant mess and takes time to build back up. Jumpstarting it off hydro or neighbours is preferred