Electricity
The sparkly stuff
Don't get me wrong, we have electricity, at least some of it. Underground generators provide barely enough for the Shelter and we get the excess, which is usually not much. No, the real issue is we don't know how to produce it. That's why its use is constrained to vital facilities like the infirmary, three fridges and the radio. Anything else is just erratically available. Hard to think about it, but it was once so common that basically everything ran on electricity.
Blood of the old world
Electricity was an absolute power back then. It was the source of nearly everything that moved, and artificial lamps would light the city as clear as day even in the darkest night. Since we use so few we might as well don't have any at all, we're probably set a few centuries back, technology-wise. They had stuff we can only see in the Mist now: instantaneous communication from any point in the whole world, trains going at hundreds of kilometers per hour, and computers! Though I have to admit I never really understood that last one. But the electronic scraps we find from time to time were computer parts, rendered useless by the absence of electricity. Still, it was all the rage before.
All of that was powered with huge power plants, wielding the might of the wind, of water current and even nuclear power, I think that's what we mostly did here. Currently, the only exploitable source is geothermy, and from what I've heard the few generators they still have running below are showing signs of fatigue and they have trouble fixing them when they fail. At some point, Trius tried to install what he called a wind turbine on top of some buildings. It worked for a time, but they got destroyed at the first Mist. Not very reliable, considering the quantity of resources that costed him. I think that was the last attempt.
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