The idea of the fall of civilsation following such an event is ludicrous.

Given emergencies, governments can setup the necessarily laws and contingencies to put focus on rebuilding the electrical infrastructure. The army has generators, which can be used to bootstrap building more and setting up makeshift transformers. Building transformers is not black magic. Nationalising eletricity-related patents and some companies to put resource on what matters and gearing up the rebuilding can be voted on rapidly.