As a powerful polar vortex brought freezing weather to much of the United States, the Texas electricity grid was "within seconds or minutes" away from a "catastrophic failure and complete blackout," on February 16, had they not decided to implement controlled outages, according to an official from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the company which manages the grid. The rolling blackouts which occurred as a result of that decision meant that more than four million customers in Texas were without electricity and heat for hours at a time, and half the counties in the state reported water problems due to power loss at water treatment facilities. As of February 19, there were reports of more than thirty-six deaths related to the storm and the loss of power, and 600,000 were still without power. Nearly a quarter of the state's population remains under orders to boil water before using it, if they have access to water at all.

How did this happen in Texas, which is the largest producer and consumer of energy in the U.S., and in Houston, which is home to 5,000 energy-related firms and calls itself the Energy Capital of the World?