Barry,

When the utility has lost most or all of their generation, they have to ramp up the generators, then add load in relatively small blocks. Otherwise they will end up either automaticaly dumping load again, or damaging the generators, which helps nobody.

When I was a substation operator before I retired I was on shift during two load-shedding incidents. In the first one the System Operator load shedded manually. Takes a lot of guts when continuity of load is pounded into you from the first day of your training. But he did the right thing.

In the second instance the load-shedding was automatic. It seemed like an eternity before we were allowed to start picking up load, but as I recall, it was only about 10 minutes until we were able to start climbing back on line. An operators job is kind of like an air traffic controler's--hours of sheer tedium punctuated by minutes of sheer terror.

Kerry