How little electricity can you live with and what are the most critical uses? It is probably easy to imagine how you could cut way down on your electricity use if it was an emergency. For us, it would mean using non-electric heat and just living without A/C. A small PV/battery system for LED lights would be easy to justify. Our well pump draws a huge amount of current, though. We would probably need to pump water by hand. Refrigeration is on the bubble for me - for a short term outage of a month or two I can use a gasoline generator. If we were without power for a decade, though, I don't know if it is possible to keep a refrigerator working. A giant bag of salt might be a better emergency resource than a generator in the long run.