<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">When should AC shut down the operations centre to do full scale back-up power testing?</font>
There is no need to shut down anything to thoroughly test a backup power system. In any case, it has recently been tested and found lacking. The question now is what will they do to correct the problem so it doesn't occur in the future. My guess is nothing.
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Many establishments only have enough emergency power for 24 hours.</font>
To supply a facility of this type with adequate power requires generators, so the duration is dependant only upon the supply of natural gas, diesel, or whatever fuel they run on.
I haven't been too hard on AC with the whole blackout thing, and since everyone gets at least one chance, not even the failure of the backup power system. If they were to investigate the cause and take remedial action I'd have not complaint whatsoever.
But I'm pretty sure they won't. They'll just say "it's not our fault" and that will be the end of it. Yes, I know they have bigger things on their mind right now. But it doesn't matter if it's 60 days or 600, once things are a little more settled, they'll still have some excuse as to why they can't deal with this problem.
But let me ask you this: how many tens of millions of dollars could they have saved if they'd spent even as much as $100,000 last week to adequately test and inspect there backup facility?