Re: Stone Age?
My understanding is that it's only long (50km+) wires that are seriously vulnerable. Your rooftop solar panels are OK, and your inverter isn't directly vulnerable. I think you may be confusing a solar storm with an atomic-weapon-induced EMP.
What happens ina solar storm is that a large DC current is induced in long wires. Conventional 50Hz or 60Hz AC mains transformers can't transform that DC current, instead they dissipate it resistively, meaning they heat up. If the circuit is not made open-circuit pretty soon, the transformers then melt down and catch fire. HVDC transmission is immune - the solar storm either adds a bit more DC juice or subtracts a bit. Short urban-grid-scale wires do suffer induced curents, but less so proportional to their shorter length. The risk to them is a disorderly shut-down or melt-down of the long-distance grid, causing voltage surges, local overload conditions, etc.
Telecomms is similar, except that it's rarely copper and even more rarely DC coupled these days. Most of the long-distance internet is optical fiber. Long-distance copper is probably found only in very rural parts, connecting one farmouse or hamlet to the nearest town's telephone exchange many miles down the road in the old-fashioned way.