In The Walking Dead, why did the hospital have power?

Question

When Rick wakes up, the hospital has power. Why? Sure, things are flickering and that, but it still has electricity.

Answer 1

In Universe:

We don't know (it is never explained), but the only logical explanation is that someone fueled the generators fairly recently. As Morgan tells Rick after Rick leaves the hospital,

Gas and light have been down for maybe a month.

This answer gives us some insight into the timing of the hospital scene. The generators would only remain operational for a day or two after the tanks were last filled, so the producers and writers probably just hoped we wouldn't think about it too much. There are all kinds of other issues we're supposed to ignore as well - for instance, how Rick survived without water for several weeks in a hot Georgia summer with no air conditioning.

If ever there was a time for the willful suspension of disbelief, it is now.

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Out of Universe:

Because they want us to be able to see. Aside from the brief sequence where Rick enters a dark stairwell, the hospital scenes are there to let us experience Rick's first look at the terrifying new reality he has found himself in. It would be silly to have him stumbling around in a totally black set for several minutes. We need to see what he's seeing.

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The Timeline:

As best we can tell, about 4-5 weeks pass between the beginning of Rick's coma and the moment he wakes up. On the show, we have Morgan's statement about when the lights went out, which must have happened a week or two after Rick was hospitalized. We also have an indirect word of god statement from Robert Kirkman (creator of The Walking Dead, writer of the comics, and producer of the show) by way of Dave Erickson (showrunner of Fear the Walking Dead):

Robert has said for him... Rick was probably [in the coma for] four to five weeks.

In the comics, we have a bit more evidence, including this:

We don't know exactly how much time passes between the hospital being abandoned and Rick waking up (on the show or in the comics), but in the comics, Lori suggests that the hospital was probably abandoned less than a week after she and Carl left home with Shane.

But Morgan says the media was reporting "for weeks" after the outbreak came to the attention of the public, and just before broadcasts stopped, they told people to seek refuge in the major cities.

However, Rick had no idea that an outbreak was happening before his coma (despite the fact that he, as a first responder, would be expected to know about the situation before the general public), so all of this must have happened after he was shot.

All of this adds up to a huge puzzle. It seems to be impossible to reconcile the various statements on the show and in the comics with all the other information we get from those sources.

In short, we can't explain why the hospital still has power. It is probably best to accept it without thinking about it too much, because it doesn't hold up to scrutiny.