Thought I would circle back around and share some stuff I found out.
Y'all remember those massive electric bills some Texans got? Turns out it was self inflicted, partially anyway. Apparently you can switch your electricity provider (I unironically like that idea), so electric companies will offer alternative plans to people to try and get more customers. One of the types of plans that is popular is called Variable rate, where you pay the market price of electricity. Normally that works out well for people because they can take advantage of basically paying wholesale price.
You can probably see what happened next but I'll still say it. ERCOT underestimated how much electricity was going to be needed, which combined with Southern Texas not being weatherized for winter weather, led to blackouts in some cities. This caused the market price of electricity to increase, which resulted in the massive bills. Whether or not those large bills qualify as price gouging is another issue, one that the Texas DOJ is probably more than willing to entertain, but it seems like this is less of a massive incident of malice and more of a collection of Three Stooges disasters piling up.