Last February, a disastrous winter storm pummeled Texas with ice and snow, threatening to topple the Texan energy grid. In the city of Denton, neighborhoods blinked off and on as the local power provider tried to conserve electricity. Places like assisted living facilities were momentarily excluded from the blackouts, but those eventually went dark too. Then the gas pipelines froze, and the power plant stopped working. Over the next four days, the city bled more than $200 million purchasing energy on the open market. It would later sue the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator also known as ERCOT, for saddling Denton with inflated energy prices that caused it to accrue $140 million in debt.