I think it’s a brilliant idea OP.
It would be easy in towns & cities as the power cables there are underground so it’s really rare to get power cuts. No need to have a back-up heating system because the first rarely, if ever, fails.
Obviously it’s a bit trickier in rural areas where poor lines are above ground and so power cuts frequently happen in the winter when you need heating the most. Plus there are health implications to living in cold houses. And unheated homes in rural areas are MUCH colder than unheated homes in cities because they aren’t surrounded by buildings which work like a sort of giant local area storage heater.
Scientific research makes clear that cold homes are harmful for their occupants and sometimes even deadly, too. There's a higher risk of stroke, respiratory infection and falls or other injuries due to people's reduced strength and dexterity in low temperatures. Cold homes can have both short and long-term consequences for a person's health, wellbeing and even their opportunities in life.
The spores released by mould fungi irritate people's lungs and can exacerbate conditions such as asthma. One nine-year study showed that living in damp and mouldy conditions for long periods is significantly related to a decline in lung function, for example: how much air people can expel in one second of breathing out.
Children living in damp, mouldy houses have an increased risk of respiratory infections. This has worried public health experts given that some children's immunity might already be impaired as a result of the pandemic lockdowns.
Even the very youngest children are at risk. Ian Sinha, a consultant respiratory paediatrician, treats babies born preterm at Alder Hey Hospital in Liverpool, UK. Some of these babies require mechanical ventilation and are sent home with oxygen supplies on their original due date so long as they are ready to leave hospital.
The consequences can be fatal. A 2011 report from University College London's (UCL) Institute of Health Equity, known as the Marmot review, estimated that 21.5% of excess winter deaths in the UK were attributable to cold homes.
There is little doubt that cold homes can kill but they can also simply worsen people's overall health and affect their quality of life. One US study, published in 2019, found an association between colder weather and a rise in dementia-related hospitalisations.
^https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20221107-energy-crisis-how-living-in-a-cold-home-affects-your-health^
OK, the focus of that article is fuel poverty rather than power cuts but lack of heating is the same result. So we can’t ban wood burners and let rural folk freeze to death or clog up the hospitals when they get ill during an extended power cut. We need a better plan.
It wouldn’t be realistic to expect elderly people to carry bedding to a village hall and sleep on the floor each time the power goes out. I doubt many could manage the walk and I don’t think it would be easy for many to get up from a floor mattress. Plus, floors are cold so they’ll likely get ill from sleeping on a temporary bed anyway.
What we could do is encourage them to move into a building which is always kept warm, not a care home but more of a communal living house. They could be given a bed, food and kept warm. It could also be somewhere that people in fuel poverty move into. Obviously this would cost money and they can’t get it for free because otherwise they’d be better off than those living in their own home. So people living in the communal house could do some work in exchange for board and lodging.
It would be both a house and a place of work. A work house, I suppose, you could call, it. For the elderly, the poor and the infirm.
Thats what you had in mind, isn’t it OP? Give people who can’t afford extortionate electricity prices or who live in areas where the power goes out regularly a choice, freeze to death or go to the workhouse.
At least that way they won’t be lighting those dreadful wood burners.
🙄