The rural co-op that provides power to my current farm does a great job providing reliable serivce but when it does go out often it can be an extended outage. About 6 years ago, a build up of ice took the primary line down. I broke out the camp stove to heat water for the all important coffee and to warm a bottle for the baby sheep in the barn. After feeding the baby, I enjoyed the coffee while knitting and listened the weather reports on the crank up radio bundled up in my down parka. There are times an all electric house is a disadvantage.

Most likely the batteries would be used for flashlights and various other emergency related items, aka camping equipment.

When we worked on our house addition I put a wood stove in the master bedroom..its a free standing soapstone stove. We used to lose power about every month but now we seem to be much more stable. With the wood stove there we could easily make one room comfortable and use it to cook. The big woodstove in the living room is an insert and with out power the blower does not work so its pretty lame. WE get big snow here in the high Rockies and this, like an ice storm can leave us with out power and "stranded" A couple years ago we had 7 feet and were with out power for nearly a week, We cooked on the gas grill, and later in the week I had to make a ski run into town.

These adventure lead me to built a Solar Generator, it can run small appliance laptop etc.

You can read about it here. http://kmswoodworks.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/modifications-to-solar-laptop-station/