I would go as far as suggesting that these things should be routinely tested. In the UK most public buildings test fire alarms once a week; a programmed plan of localised, managed blackouts, to be carried out once every few years, would probably help in the long run - particularly as the grid is rapidly changing as described at the end of the post.

Of course they should be routinely tested. This is not a new idea and is an established best practice.

This is why I am very surprised when I read that hospitals generators failing to take over is just "one of those things".

It's like the 'old' saying that you don't have backups until you test recovery from backups...

We didn't hear about all the other hospitals that easily switched over to generators, just the one that failed. There's room for investigation there, but it's on the site, not the system.

Definitely. We use seasonal demand peaks to learn how to cope with extremes. But if we didn't have those plus strikes I'd definitely be planning a few test runs.