The Atlantic What went wrong? The Lone Star State made three fundamental errors. February 21, 2021 Texas’s outage left millions of people, including Manessa Grady and her two sons, in the dark.Tamir Kalifa / The New York Times / Redux How could this have happened? For four days, millions of people in Texas—the so-called energy capital of the world—shivered in the dark, unable to turn the lights on or run their heaters during some of the coldest days in decades. At least 30 Texans have died so far, including a 75-year-old man whose oxygen machine lost power and an 11-year-old boy who may have perished of hypothermia. Desperate families have tried to stay warm by running generators and grills indoors, leading to more than 450 carbon-monoxide poisonings, many of them in children.