As best I can tell Texas' problem is one of politics. They made the decision to not be connected to the national power grid so as to avoid federal regulation. On top of that, they chose to make no regulation requiring power generators to be able to function in lower temperatures - so the generators don't because if they do, their competitors could undercut them by fractions of a penny per KWh.

Go have a look at poweroutage.us. Note that a few states on the national grid have more than 100K customers without power - but (as of 2/17) Texas has more than 3 million.

Poweroutage.us uses red to indicate 'over 100K', and yes there are a few states besides TX in red - but there's a big difference between 100K and 1M.