That is only nine years away, not a very long time.

Recharging cell phone batteries when there is no power is really not a problem anymore. We battery back-ups, personal generators or neighbors with one, car chargers, battery-powered inverters (Milwaukee, Ryobi, DeWalt, and others all have them), and other ways to keep our phones charged.

However, what good is a charged cell phone when there are no powered towers to talk to? Your landline will not work when the neighborhood hub has no power.

POTS line are all gone or going away. COWs are ok, but there is no way the carriers will have enough 5G ones to cover a large area like Houston, much less the whole state.

Regulations will not do any good. There were regulations in place to keep the power on during a freeze in Texas. I'm sure there were regulations in place to prevent the huge blackout in the north-east a few years back. The corporations will do what they want.

Maybe it's time to stock up on signal flares and old-fashioned hand crank air raid sirens.

A possibility might be old fashioned emergency call boxes for neighborhoods. Install them by the mail box clusters. Make them battery/solar powered and on the radio system that first responders use. Just an idea.