The problem of getting power to startup equipment is one thing, but there’s another cool problem that this article covers but I don’t think explained very well.

A power grid is a massive distributed physical system. The energy input must exactly match the energy output at all times.

But what happens when the energy ins and outs are not balanced? The answer is that a balance is found somehow. Physics demands it.

If there is excess power on the grid and no electrical load, that power comes back to the generator (s). The turbines or whatever driving the generators produce more torque than the removeding torque from the generator coils, so they speed up. The AC grid frequency is mostly maintained by the rotating generator speed (3000 rpm for 50 Hz), so that goes up too.

Conversely, if there is excess load and not enough power, electrical drag from the generator coils exceeds the torque from the turbine (or whatever), and the generator slows down. The operator has to burn more fuel, or pull out control rods, or open more water gates, to get the speed back up.

So what is the black start challenge here? You have to go from 0 W to whatever GW the grid normally runs at. Normally when a generator plant is switched onto the grid, that gen represents a small fraction of the total grid power, so the disturbance to the grid is small. But coming back from a black start that’s not true. Going from 1 plant online to 2: you could be doubling the power level. This means you have to switch on loads (possibly many km away) at the exact same time you switch in the power. If the disturbance is too much, various equipment will trip off the grid as the AC frequency careens out of control.

“Because they were prevented from restocking, they are now out of food, but this condition need not continue if they are restocked.”. Is that good enough?

F35 is a major maintenance time sink. Something on the order of 10 mechanic-hours of maintenance for every flight hour. I’ve heard it costs something like 12k USD in maintenance just to start the engine and bring it to low idle.

I suspect it would take a lot less than six months to ground a fleet when the spare parts get cut off.

NATO allies are expected to standardize their military equipment and processes to some extent, so they can interoperate with each other. This is why there’s NATO standard ammunition, and why the US military does a lot of stuff in metric.

One non-dirty-tricks reason to do this would be to give Ukraine ample time to get all that administrative stuff in order.

Yep. Linux is a total pain in the behind to write applications for, because of API and ABI instability. Just ask notable Linux desktop application developer Linus Torvalds.