Why is there no electricity available in the Walking Dead Series?

I've been wondering this for a while. Why is there no electricity in the post apocalyptic world?

Answer

As the documentary series Life After People showed so eloquently, without people manning the equipment power plants break down and stop working very quickly. Even the powerful hydro-electric Hoover Dam would stop providing power after just a year or two due to requiring constant maintenance to keep the turbines spinning. I think you seriously underestimate the amount of work required to operate even a small power plant.

My uncle is an electrician who is paid a ridiculous amount of money to repair electricity-producing wind-turbines in southeastern Australia. His job consists of spending 10 hours a day on-site, just in case repairs are needed. The reason for this is that while the turbines could spin for 100 years without fail in ideal circumstances, circumstances are never ideal. The biggest issue is birdstrike; Shannon often laments that his job isn't repairing electrical faults, but scraping dead birds off the turbines and doing a quick check that no wires were broken after the steelworkers - who are also on-site 10 hours a day - hammer the turbines back into place. And wind-farms are considered Australia's least labour-intensive power-producing facilities.

This page from the American Bureau of Labor Statistics states that in 2012 there were 60,700 people working in power plants in the United States. That includes supervisors, management staff, and grunts on the floor like my uncle. The site also points out that power distribution is the sort of job that requires long term on-the-job training, even if you have a university degree in the subject. How many of those 60,700 people survived the outbreak, and the roaming bands afterwards? And that's just people working in the plants themselves. What about the people that repair the power lines between the plants and the residences, commercial and industrial areas that rely on those plants for power? How about the many power lines which actually run underground? How about the divers who clean molluscs and freshwater kelp off the water turbines in hydroelectric dams? They're not counted, and I would be surprised if they didn't amount to at least double the number of people the Bureau does count in their statistics.

Since we now know that power generation and distribution is actually considerably more labour and time intensive than you originally thought, we can understand why there aren't very many sources of electricity in the post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead. This is something which was handled very well in the latter two films in the Mad Max trilogy, most notably in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, where the only person left alive in central Australia with the training and skills to actually run a bio-mass fueled power plant, Master (one half of Master-Blaster), was able to essentially set himself up as a dictator for a short period of time, due to the fact that none of the post-apocalyptic survivors were willing to go without their newly-regained electricity and running water. There are actually very few people out there who possess the necessary skills to run power plants, and those who have those skills would be in relatively short-supply, and able to command a high price for their skills, in a post-apocalyptic scenario.

This is not to say that there will be no electricity whatsoever. I myself possess the requisite skills to run a small generator, as do most of my family. But most commercially-available generators that anyone who is not an expert in the field can operate require petrol. And one thing Mad Max - and most other post-apocalyptic programs - gets wrong is that, as this old Cracked article states, gasoline goes bad very quickly. So in addition to not being able to drive in their magically never dirty car, the protagonists of The Walking Dead would also not be able to use most available generators to produce electricity.

With electricity gone, cell towers are obviously not operational. The satellites are probably in orbit, but with no Umbrella Corporation buried deep underground to communicate with they're essentially useless. Searching for tips on how to survive the zombie apocalypse online won't be possible - and after doing a quick search for that Cracked article I wouldn't recommend most of the available online advice anyway - and even landlines would be rendered useless quickly by the lack of people turning up to work at the switching stations. Your local petrol station or mall would likely still have power from their back-up generator for a short time, but roving bandits will probably steal them without any real idea how to use them very quickly.

In short, electricity goes bye-bye in any situation in which law and order break down. Zombies simply speed up the process by eating the staff.