[crote]

"But what if thing thing that never happens were to happen?"

We'd probably go deep into hydro, fire up every gas peaker plant, and through skyrocketing prices incentivize everyone to switch to emergency diesel generators where possible.

You're talking about a once-in-100+-years event. We'll deal with it the same way we dealt with the various oil crises.

[leonidasrup]

Those once-in-100+-years events are called crises because they have large impact on economy and loss of human life.

For example a short event in US with duration 2 hours–4 days, depending on location, affecting 55 million people.

Deaths: Almost 100

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

The Economic Impacts of the August 2003 Blackout

"Based on the much-studied 1977 New York City blackout. ICF Consulting estimated the total economic cost of the August 2003 blackout to be between $7 and $10 billion"

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ml1113/ml111300584.pdf

Short blackout: 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout

"The employers' organization CEOE estimated that the outage resulted in economic losses valued at €1.6 billion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...

[XorNot]

You can't fire up capacity you don't have. Your scenario implies a massive idle stock of power plants.

Who's going to build and run them? They'd be enormously expensive because they'd almost never sell power.

(Of course the answer is if you build 3 weeks of battery storage you can pretty obviously build 4).