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As awful as this is, things could be even worse. Imagine for a moment that that the power never came back on.

Hold it!

I am sorry but except in a "Dies the Fire" fantasy where the laws of physics get rewritten the power will come back on.

It may take a while, even a few years at worse but it will be back. Making a generator is not that hard, they were doing it in the 1700's. Got a river or stream? You have the engine to turn the wheels to generate electricity. No flowing water? Wind will work. You will need to make wet cell batteries but they were doing that 2000 BC.

Will we have "all we need"? Probably. Not all we want but enough to get things back up and running. And that will be built on.

In case of EMP that took down the entire grid all over the world (Unlikely as that is) with in a week you would have some clever folks generating their own electricity. Certainly with a month.

Getting the entire thing back up and running would only take a few years if people were properly motivated. I have no doubt they would be motivated.

The trick be surviving until things began to sort themselves out.

The trick will be to survive the utter mayhem that would result. Many would not survive to see the grid brought back on line. Sometimes, the utter mayhem leads to a Dark Ages. Rome had many inventions in common use which were lost for centuries. The laws of physics were not repealed, but still, the old ways were lost to centuries of feudalism under barbaric warlords across wide swaths of the former Roman Empire.

Look at much of post-colonial Africa today. Roads collapse and are never repaired. Copper is stripped out to make bracelets and the wiring is never replaced. Etc. I know that Africa is a rather special case, but it proves that declines can become self-reinforcing, even in our modern era.

The “sorting out” is the problem, however optimistic a scenario you wish to paint. The book “One Second After” offers a plausible scenario of post EMP chaos and survival. The power will not come back on quickly enough to matter for the sick, frail, or anyone dependent on medication, they will be gone within a month. While we can envision enclaves of technologists (perhaps you and I, for example) who will find ways to spin a water wheel or wind generator, there are more efficient ways to make light and preserve food, especially considering there are a lot more of “them” who would kill and steal to take things of value than there are of “us”. If the majority of the population is reduced to survivalism within a month or two, getting the lights on will be a relatively low priority.

However, generating sufficient power to enable communications would be a top priority, I’m with you there, and ignoring the potential to restore radio communications is one of the few nits I would pick with Forstchen’s book.

There's at least one government report that detailed the ugly truth of the results of a Carrington level event. A few years would be a best case scenario. Government as it exists now would be non-existent. Once the grid goes down and the stored fuel that's accessible is gone, it would be a very different world.

The reason is the main transformers that exist at big baseload power plants. There's one monster transformer for each phase. Those have a lead time of over a year. There used to be one and only one plant in the US that made them. A Carrington level event would destroy hundreds of those transformers if the report is to be believed.

It is conceivable that some areas might not recover for decades if at all. The immediate result of a Carrington level event would be the death of millions in a very short time due the loss of modern infrastructure such as water treatment facilities and the ability to transport food stuffs. Large cities would be uninhabitable.

You can forget the idea of continuity of government. I've personally seen the level of planning that ignores reality. Locally during the current power outages, the level of incompetence is staggering. I'm seeing that in the utility effort which exemplifies the failure of top down management or central planning and even the Red Cross which is showing some unbelievable lack of basic preparedness.

It was very instructive to talk to three Red Cross crews in the past two days and realize they are unprepared to the point they can't accomplish something as basic as find an address. Same with the National Guard.

If the basics can't be accomplished in something like the current situation, the reprecussions of a Carrington level event are so extreme they are simply beyond the comprehension of most.

These are pictures of the specialized Schnabel rail cars used to transport the main transformers used at power plants. These are also few and far beween. I suspect there are only a couple in North America.

BTW, there's only one plant that builds large generators in this counry too.