The Colony's Power Problems

[Duffusmonkey]

I like the Zombie treadmill idea!
Gas them out, chain them to treadmills attached to generators and dangle so food in front of them. You could feed them table scraps, rotten food, road kill, mallers etc!
It would be VERY "Shaun of the Dead" to end the series by turning zombies into domestic servants.

The survivors could get themselves in an unrecoverable fuel situation if they are not careful. If they use up all the local fuel they will not have enough fuel to go the distance to get more. They need to aggressively look for tankers that they can use to pump out gas stations. If they have to travel on foot, or horseback?, to get fuel they probably won't survive.

The real problem is that the survivors don't have a mechanical engineer, power is actually really easy IF you are not worried about pollution.

Get an old incenerator, a boiler and a steam turbine and you can make power with anything that burns, plastic has lots of energy but the exhaust fumes are pretty poisonous.

I believe I heard on the "Were Alive Fancast" Podcast the idea of making icehouses. You could actually travel to an energy source, like a gas station miles away and run generators to make blocks of ice that you truck back. It would take a quick experiment to see if 100 lbs of gasoline could make more or less than 100 lbs of ice. Move the fuel or the ice whichever more efficient.

Another option is to take propane powered refrigerators out of RV's These refrigerators have no moving parts and only use electricity to control the temperature.

Also the survivors need someone's grandmother to show them how to can fruits and vegetables.

Windmill have been used to pump water for hundreds of years, and there is actually a lot of farming done near LA so they should be able to steal one.

Other power sources are landfills. Landfills make natural gas for a long time. Most landfills just burn it off but they built a prison near me right next to a landfill because they use the natural gas to heat the prison. CNG Compressed Natural Gas is a pain to use as an truck fuel because the filling stations are huge and insanely expensive to compress it to 3600 psi, and it is still a gas. Propane is better because it converts to a liquid at around 130psi (at room tempurature). The problem with propane is that it does not occur naturally.