After reading with some interest that as predicted solar flares are now hitting earth's atmosphere from the sun, the resulting geothermal storms which will follow over the next century may have the capacity to render the entire electrical grid useless, meaning that basically nothing will work. I have limited belief in the 2013 theory of complete outage, however reading over previous data from total grid blackouts, it is actually a possibility, when combined with things like basic human error. Whether this materialises, remains to be seen. It is thought, that comms links, power outages, radio stations, tv networks etc will not be able to properly function, or reach a point of inoperable state over a period of time.

Referencing wikipedia, you can see, that this scenario, is a possibility, that is, if you are lucky enough to have power on just now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages