Illustration by Texas Monthly; Getty
Not long before Valentine’s Day, Pat Wood III got a text message from Griddy Energy, his electric provider, warning that extremely cold weather was about to wreak havoc on the electricity market in Texas. “Prices are looking to stay at record rates over the next couple of days due to the polar vortex,” the notice read. “Unless you are a Griddy energy-saving expert, we recommend you immediately switch to another provider.”
Wood followed the company’s advice, even though almost no Texan could be considered more of an “energy-saving expert.” The former chairman of the state’s Public Utility Commission, appointed by Governor George W. Bush in 1995, Wood helped set up Texas’s deregulated market. He later followed Bush to Washington and ran the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, where he dealt with the California power crisis in 2001 and a blackout in the Northeast—one of the largest in U.S. history—two years later.