I really do sympathize with everything you said, but a coast to coast power outage is very very unlikely to happen. East coast or west coast by themselves is much more likely (and in fact NE, and NW have both happened in the past, but not for 60 days). And most of Texas is in the ERCOT region so even if the rest of the country did go down, it wouldn't affect us here because we're basically not connected to the rest of the country. In fact, the NSA chose San Antonio for a data center for that very reason....the rest of the country could be dark and we'd still be up and running.rbwhatever1 wrote: I think a 60 day power outage from coast to coast would get things settled nicely in these United States...
Even so, it would take a widespread and significant attack on the most vulnerable system nodes, and power would still be restored for most of the country in a matter of hours or days, not weeks (though some areas could remain blacked out for longer and other areas could experience rolling blackouts). All in all it would come down to system limitations due to the loss of some system equipment, which in essence is effectively a shortage of supply, not an absence of supply or delivery. For perspective, Pakistan has a total system demand of about 15 GW (less than 1/4 of the demand in ERCOT alone) and only about 7 GW of generation, so power is rationed, but most everything still runs a little each day.
So, unless the country gets seriously nuked a long-term coast to coast outage isn't going to happen (and if that happens, a power outage will be near the bottom of our problem list).