Exit and egress lighting, emergency lighting or emergency light fixture, having internal supercapacitor power sources are recharged after a power outage using a staggered power up process. For example, once an emergency light fixture detects a power-on transition from power being unavailable on a power source to power being available from the power source, the fixture waits a predetermined time to recharge a supercapacitor based on a charge time delay value. The predetermined time may be selected to be unique for one or several emergency light fixtures so as to distribute a combined peak power demand of the fixtures. After the predetermined time has expired, the supercapacitor is electrically coupled to a power source to in order to recharge the supercapacitor.