After a catastrophe like that left me on my first save with no power for 3 hours (no coal on the lines and a huge mess of wiring to debug in order to isolate the generation and bootstrap it once again) I went nuts on the second one. I decided that guaranteeing each power plant could self start was the way, I did that by keeping a single extra disconnected generator with enough resources to restart each power tier separate from the whole grid just by changing a couple of wires and maybe moving a pipe or belt (this was before switches)

Finally on my 1.0 save I even made 3 separate distribution grids: on my highway, on poles and on train tracks connecting each section of generation, production and power storage separately to all 3 via priority switches just in case I needed to do some complicated procedure to restart the plant like connecting just coal to batteries until there was enough power to start fuel generation and then gradually reconnect several areas to fuel while I recharged batteries from coal to restart nuclear.

Never ended up needing them because by then I knew better, but it made a nice looking control panel