that depends - it could have been a placebo bat, or even a homeophatic one

well power is even more important than "computing".
many places (like hospitals, datacenters) are usually able to generate power for a long time.
but not everyone does; maybe they have some UPS (for the servers) for "short" downtimes. but if the powerline is down long enough, "computing" doesn't matter anyway.

1. power _doesn't_ "just" go down. power outages are few and short.
2. huge UPS arrays/backup generators are not worth the cost of investment, maintainance,...

so if you could get an ISP to offer service as reliable as power is delivered in the civilized world _and_ a service provider to satisfy all your computing needs just as reliable; combined with minimalistic thin clients just running some browser/X/whatever.
yeah, that could work. but not everywhere, and not really soon