If it's just a couple of local substations, "rebooting" is AFAIK not very hard. First the substation is connected to other substations by closing the breakers on each high-voltage circuit between them, one by one; this energizes the transformers in the substation. Then the breakers to the outgoing feeders are closed one by one, which sends power to the loads. There might also be some maneuvering far from the substation to move loads from one substation to another.
What's hard is when the outage is also on the generation side; "rebooting" from a full outage (black start) can be a complex dance between starting generators, connecting substations, and energizing loads, since generation has to be matched to consumption at all times, and nearly all generators need power themselves to run (on a full black start, small diesel generators, started by even smaller batteries, are the initial point).
Remember when trying to make a vaccine was 5-10 years, but when an entire country/world makes something a priority and become hyper focused and motivated they'll 10x output.
The problem is when regardless of input you can't speed up the output. Think of a pregnancy, adding more pregnant women doesn't speed up the process, and consuming more inputs doesn't speed up the progress.
The electrical grid is nearly a "living entity". It isn't exactly like even if all the replacements magically appeared the problem is solved by a long shot.
My understanding is that large transformers aren't standard; they need to be custom-made for their application. (Not sure why, and there'd be big benefits to changing this, but that's what I've heard...)
That's for new orders not an indication of replacement depth held by the utility companies though. Also in an emergency orders could be redirected to companies that need them unless it's a country-wide damaging event.
Right, but power companies likely hold enough for a year's worth of natural disasters + a 10-20% cushion. Sabotage can be a lot more destructive than random failure.
I think you're basically agreeing with what I'm saying. Small scale localized disasters aren't going to take a year to repair because companies keep some repair stock on hand or have replacements in the pipeline for existing equipment. It's only when we get to disasters that threaten to completely deplete repair/reserve stocks that the 1 year wait time for new grid scale transformers becomes truly concerning.
