There was a question asked once on one of the “prepping” sites: how much would a permanent electrical outage disrupt your life.

I answered that it would most likely be an unrecoverable, life-threatening disaster, to which the local “experts” laughed, saying how hard is it to heat your home and cook your meals on wood and coal like people used to? I concluded that they didn’t really think things through.

Let’s just go with the obvious – heat, light, cooking. If your apartment or a house isn’t designed around solid fuels – meaning wood and coal – you might not even have a chimney to get the smoke out. If you do, it’s most likely connected to the kitchen ventilation hood, and you would have to get a wood stove and rework your kitchen quite a bit to have it installed in place of the electrical appliances, and that would give you only a single-point heating source. Central heating, with circulation of hot water across the radiators, uses an electric pump, which means that if you have central heating on utility gas, it won’t work if there’s no electricity. This means your entire family would have to move their beds to the proximity of the wood stove in the kitchen. Also, since your home isn’t designed around it, and people don’t have experience with it, there would be a significant increase in numbers of carbon monoxide poisoning cases, because people wouldn’t know to ventilate the place properly, or know what is dangerous.

The second thing is, do you know how much coal/wood you need to get through the winter? Do you have it? Do you have a place to store it? Is it dry? Do you know where to buy it? Is there even enough on the market for everybody, and can you afford it?

Let’s just say that there is enough coal, but the distribution network doesn’t exist, and people absolutely don’t have adequate storage for the quantities required. Also, burning coal for domestic use in the cities would produce such degradation of air quality we haven’t seen for a century. As for wood, there’s absolutely not enough for everybody. The logistics absolutely aren’t there for the big cities.

As for the light, petroleum and gas powered lights do work, as do the candles. However, using open flame as a light source would increase the number of fires.

Everything you have in the refrigerator would go bad, and you would have to either prepare it for immediate consumption, or throw it out. The same would happen in the big refrigeration centres and shopping malls. Refrigeration is absolutely necessary for ensuring food supply of the kind we are used to, and we can’t just flip a switch and do it the 19th century way. There were 1.5 billion people in the world in the 19th century, and that’s a high estimate, and it also assumes a civilization that is optimized very precisely for that way of life. We are at 7.9 billion now. Returning to the 19th century means there are suddenly no resources for the 6.4 billion people, and it’s not that they would just die. No, they would rob and kill everybody first, and then die. Such a sudden drop in available resources would be an extinction-level event, not a “return to the good old times”.

Modern medicine works on electricity, so no modern medicine.

No refrigeration. Medications require refrigeration, so no medications.

Industry requires electricity, so no industry.

Every damn thing that works on gas and oil also has some part that requires electricity to run.

Every damn thing that used to be wind and water powered in the past is now powered by electricity; think windmills, or water mills. Can’t mill wheat into flower without rebuilding those from scratch. Bakeries used to work on coal and wood; not anymore. Can’t buy bread.

No Internet. No computers. No mobile networks. No radio, no TV. No communications. Can’t call the police, or ambulance, or the fire department. Beyond what you can see, and beyond a distance you can ride a bicycle to in reasonable time, communications are broken and you don’t know what’s going on.

No banks, no ATMs, no cash registers in the stores and no POS devices. No money, because the paper money would become worthless quickly and people would revert to barter, because they no longer have any experience with precious metals as money.

Lawlessness. Armed gangs roaming the streets, robbing houses and apartment blocks. Martial law, where the police and the military might actually be as dangerous as the gangs.

A permanent no-electricity situation isn’t a “oh, we’ll burn coal and wood like our grandparents” situation. It’s the extinction event. The greatest number of deaths in a nuclear war scenario isn’t due to the atomic bombs hitting you, or the radiation; it’s due to a disruption in transportation, refrigeration and so on. The bombs and radiation kill tens of millions. Lack of electricity and fuel kills billions.

That’s why I don’t have a backup plan for the complete lack of electricity; because it’s a doomsday scenario. It is not realistically survivable.