During the last outage my neighbor had to leave his house because of the temperature. He had a generator running for days (off of the natural gas line) so I thought he was fine, but his old AC wouldn't start so he texted me as he was leaving to stay at a hotel.

This is important enough to me that I researched slow start AC units ~8 years ago when replacing my AC. I learned that almost any heat pump will do, so that's what I have.