Brief energy highlights

** The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing on the East Palestine derailment on an unspecified date in early March.

** Physical attacks on the power grid are likely to increase this year, according to a confidential industry analysis viewed by The Wall Street Journal, as attacks increased by 71% in 2022 compared with 2021, with ballistic damage, intrusion and vandalism largely contributing to the increase.

** The “Buy America” initiative that President Biden says will promote domestic manufacturing and fuel a blue-collar renaissance is running into a problem: The United States no longer produces many of the items needed to modernize roads, bridges and ports.

** A JD Power study found that 21% of charging attempts ending in failure, thanks to broken chargers, software problems, vandalism, and payment processing errors.

** Thousands gathered at New Jersey’s Point Pleasant beach on Sunday with a united mission: to pause offshore wind projects in response to recent whale deaths along the New York-New Jersey coast.

** America’s “Big Three” passive investing funds own more of Tesla than founder Elon Musk does, per the FT. BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street have a combined 13.58% stake in the US electric-car maker.

World

** The president of a major producer in the chip supply chain thinks companies will soon stop relying on China to manufacture their products, thanks to new rules from the U.S. “The business model of producing in China and exporting abroad is no longer viable,” Hideo Tanimoto, president of Kyocera, told the Financial Times.

** Saudi Arabia’s receipts from oil sales abroad fell for a sixth straight month but still capped a year that saw the kingdom rack up the highest annual income during Mohammed bin Salman’s time as crown prince and de facto ruler.

** Russian exports of discounted crude and fuel oil to China have jumped to record levels as the re-opening of the world’s biggest energy importer gathers pace after the dismantling of Covid Zero.

** The International Energy Agency on Tuesday accused fossil fuel industries of doing too little to curb methane emissions and undermining global climate goals to limit warming.

** China is the largest market for electric vehicles in the world. Germany was the second until the US just displaced Europe’s largest economy as EV sales accelerated. BloombergNEF data shows the US is now the world’s second-largest EV market, shifting Germany down to the third spot. Last year, nearly one million EVs were sold in the US, compared with 650,000 in 2021.

** Chinese electric vehicle (EV) startup Nio Inc plans to build 1,000 battery-swapping stations in China in 2023 to bring the total number of such facilities to 2,300 by year-end, its Founder and Chairman William Li said on Tuesday.