powering up the station and sending the electricity out to the national grid to bring other systems back online in turn. It’s called a “black start.”
For humanity, fossil fuels like coal and crude oil were our black start, literally and figuratively. They were conveniently stockpiled underground, easy to access, easy to move around, and easy to use; after all, people have been creating energy by combustion since before we were even Homo sapiens, Fossil fuels lifted us out of darkness, literally and metaphorically, giving us the time and resources to create our global, connected, highly cooperative, technological civilization. But above all, fossil fuels created the conditions for humanity to invent the renewable energy technologies that will supplant them.