Ok I just had to chime in on this...
Sounds to me like there's a wholotta speculation about what the impacts/risks/damages would be from both EMP and Solar flares/coronal discharges. Too many people misinterpreting too many variables, crossing concepts with incorrect associations, etc etc.
Things like rats crawling into transformers, EMP discharges, and solar flares are apples, turnips, and chives. They have so little in common in terms of cause/effect that they don't even belong in the same chapter of a book, nevermind sentence. Do they all have an effect on electrical/electronic equipment? Yes. To varying degrees. Do they have comparable effects? Only about as comparable as apples, turnips, and chives. They're all biological organisms. Hardly puts them all in the same class, now does it?
When you turn off a single light bulb in your house (assuming you're on grid), somewhere, a regulator compensates for this. Is it measurable? Not really, but anybody using RE can vouch for the concept since it's much more noticeable when smaller production facilities are in use. Moral of the story? Everything has an impact, but it's important to understand the susceptibility of the equipment in question, as well as not trying to apply concepts that are not even factors.
I personally am not going to worry about any of this stuff; no faraday cage wallpaper, no uber-grounding, none of that. As someone pointed out (don't exactly remember who), if its a big enough problem to affect the grid, the (forgive me here) measly RE systems won't do squat to keep us alive because everything and everyone "else" runs on the grid.
If the grid goes down due to a cascade, it is 'rebootable', and although it may take a while to bring it back online, the RE has nothing to do with the grid (even if you're tied; you'd overload-disconnect as soon as it went down).
Only the people that can (and do) literally COMPLETELY sustain their needs for months or even years on end with no 'ties' to the outside world would be able to thrive if something of catastrophic consequences were to take out the grid.
And no, shy of a true EMP (ie nuke), it's highly unlikely that the phenomena will be potent enough to take down individual RE systems.
Besides, if a nuke hits, are you really going to care whether you can still turn your lights on or not? Let the cockroaches figure THAT out... LOL
mv rant /dev/null
Steve