The alternatives offered in the article don't seem well thought out. My parents house, in a somewhat rural (but not THAT rural) part of California had a power

The alternatives offered in the article don't seem well thought out. My parents house, in a somewhat rural (but not THAT rural) part of California had a power outage that lasted from Christmas into this year (and the power is still going out sporadically). The straightforward solution is to buy a generator for $1-$2k and use it sparingly to keep the heat running and maybe the lights and a computer. The solution offered here is to get solar panels (which cost maybe $20-30k after the tax credit) and a Tesla Powerwall for another $10k. But if it snows hard enough to take out their power lines, I can't imagine that the solar panels will perform well. So they'd be spending 20-40 times more money on a solution that won't work as well (and that's before going into location specific problems, like the giant trees that would block the panels, some of which are on other people's property)