** Protesters of the Enbridge Line 3 oil pipeline under construction near Duluth, Minnesota threw a package at a work site then fled the area, prompting a sheriff’s bomb squad to be called in by workers.
** The U.S. Senate energy committee will hold a hearing on electric grid reliability sparked by this week’s mass outages across the Southeast.
** Senior House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, on Thursday said the Energy and Commerce Committee would hold hearings to investigate the crisis, and Sen. Joe Manchin is planning his own look into the issue at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
** German power supplier RWE says ice storms halted much of its Texas fleet of wind turbines, pushing it to buy pricey electricity and dealing a blow to its annual earnings.
** Kenworth recently delivered its first two natural gas-electric hybrid trucks to drayage and warehouse supplier Total Transportation Systems Inc. in Southern California. But the state’s regulatory shift from lower to zero emissions means they likely will be the last.
** Bloomberg reports the historic freeze has resulted in no liquefied natural gas tankers docked and loading at any of the six U.S. export terminals, an indication of how far LNG trade flows were upended by the historic weather.
** A grid operator is urging Californians to conserve energy as a way to help those facing blackouts in Texas and other states hit hard by winter storms over the last week. “It’s a good time to help others in the central US facing #severeweather conditions,” grid operator California ISO announced on Twitter.
** The grid operator in the Mid-Atlantic region adopted tough rules after the 2014 Polar Vortex to ensure reliability during cold snaps, unlike Texas, its proponents say.
** Former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan resigns after 50 years in office and amid a federal corruption investigation involving utility ComEd.
** Maine regulators open an investigation of the future design of the state’s distribution system in the wake of the uproar over a utility plan to drastically increase the interconnection of solar projects.
** The Bureau of Land Management’s approval of a Nevada lithium mine was done without allowing the Fort McDermitt Paiute Shoshone Tribe to comment, which is raising concerns about the project from tribal citizens now aware of it.
** The closure of the Navajo Generating Station in 2019 resulted in a $40 million loss in property tax revenue for an Arizona county.
** A Hawaii bill that would issue a tax on cars retailing for more than $60,000 and use the resulting funds to deploy electric vehicle charging stations advances out of a House committee.