> but somewhere in the system you need a honda petrol generator, which is enough to excite the electromagnets on a bigger generator ...

Tangent, but players of Satisfactory might recognize this condition. If your main power infrastructure somehow goes down, you might not have enough power to start the pumps/downstream machines to power up your main power generators. Thus it's common to have some Tier 0 generators stashed away somewhere to kick start the rest of the system (at least before giant building-sized batteries were introduced a few updates ago).