I'd bet two things 1) They are referring to the NE blackout that crippled a good chunk of North America. It also hit Britain, Sidney and several other major cities in series.
Lack of investment in electrical power generation and distribution rather than 'a hacker in a cave in Afghanistan' is much more likely cause of electrical power going down. Those countries that have a lack of investment in their electrical power distribution networks seem to have the most problems with blackouts and brownouts especially when having to cope with adverse weather conditions.
I don't remember any blackout in Britain after the North East American incident in 2003 , but some 500,000 Londoners had a 34 minute blackout on the 28th August 2003. I think that this might be what your probably refering to. As with anything that happens in London, it soon becomes a national emergency and is blown out of all proportion by the London based media.
On the day of the blackout London Mayor Ken Livingstone declared the situation a "catastrophic failure" and "the normal British disease of underinvestment and not keeping your plant up to date". The press followed this lead. The power transmission company National Grid responded that, as they had invested £3000 million in the last 10 years, the system certainly could not be described as old and decrepit
The Estonian incident was a distributed denial of service DDoS attack on certain web servers based in Estonia. The webbots being mostly distributed in unsecure computers from US networks. This is completely different to a hacker gaining access by logging in to a secured network which may possibly have some controlling function within a power station or even the control room of the electrical distribution network. The chances of this are pretty remote without someone breaching the electricity companies strict security measures i.e someone with super user admin rights within the organisation.
But then again this reminds me of the story of a British hacker who wrote a simple cgi script which scanned through all the US Pentagons military .mil websites looking for login scripts and then reported back the ones which accepted UN=admin and PW=password. Even he was surprised how many Pentagon .mil websites/secure networks he was able to access.
The moral of the story is - If your using a wireless router turn on the wireless security and in addition if using a non-wireless router turn of the remote access to the router and change your routers default access Username and Password.
Install a firewall and monitor the programs and ports the programs are attempting to use to gain access to the internet.
Install a anti-virus prgram.
Install a spyware program.
Because if a terrorist is going to bring down the national electricity grid you don't want the Feds turning up at your door after tracking down your IP address.
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