It seems they just wanted something to help power their devices during an outage. You can use fire (like your stove) to boil water during a power outage.
30 watts into a power bank that can output more watts on demand should keep your phone and one laptop usable indefinitely unless you use them 24/7.
Obviously a proper setup in the range of at least a few kilowatts would be more useful, but that's expensive, may require permitting (changes appearance of the house), etc.