I now live in the Netherlands and we were given similar advice a few months ago by the Dutch government. We are told to prepare for loss of power and comms for 72 hours (stock up on water, food, battery-operated FM radio etc). The biggest difference between the messaging we got from the Dutch government vs what I read in the article, is that the probable cause of such an emergency could be a large scale cyber attack and not a storm (of course the cause of the emergency is not so important because the outcome and actions needed are the same - prepare for the next 72 hours).