Okay, not a fan of the Guy itself..but realistically speaking..what exactly was he, a representative supposed to do? Pray for the service technician to repair swiftly? Stand vigil in armor like a knight protecting the very populace that entrusted their vote in him? Surely, going on vacation on the day of crisis is a thing..but the press conference is usually the day after when some facts are gathered, he as politician can do like nothing, power loss of that scale is already priority 1 for all people involved, there is literally nothing he can do to speed up the process. Might as well relax before the coming storm of questions.
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The Mayor playing tennis is only the snowflake on the tip of the iceberg of Berlin just doing Berlin things for decades.
Prolonged large scale power outages have been a hot topic in Germany since 2005, when particularly heavy snowfall during a harsh winter storm brought down a bunch of pylons carrying medium and high voltage transmission lines and plunged 25 municipalities housing 250.000 people in the Münsterland region into darkness. (some of them for weeks) The problem was exacerbated by the large size of the affected region, impassable roads due to downed trees, and the heavy snow load also overwhelming the roof on quite a number of buildings. (German Wikipedia article on the event, section about the power outage)
Since then, all over Germany, plans and more or less thorough preparations for responding to such an event have been made. For example public buildings suitable as emergency shelters were equipped with emergency power supplies, mobile heaters and generators have been procured, response plans for power outages were created, or updated.
The outage in Berlin was/is of a comparatively limited scale (both area and affected number of people wise, also there were practically no exacerbating circumstances), yet Berlin was caught rather unprepared and the response was chaotic. So, as typical for Berlin, its administration must have been playing games (maybe even Tennis) instead of doing their homework for the last 20 years.
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