** U.S. President Donald Trump said that his administration would likely stop buying oil from Venezuela and was looking “very strongly” at the South American country. “It was a great country 20 years ago, and now it’s a mess,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office hours after his inauguration.
** Former U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm points to a new West Virginia battery factory as evidence of how the Biden administration’s clean energy package sparked a “manufacturing renaissance,” and warns that Trump’s rollbacks will cede that progress to China.
** The U.S. House on a voice vote Wednesday approved H.R. 204, ACRES Act, to require that the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior submit accurate reports regarding hazardous fuels reduction activities, and for other purposes. It was sent to the Senate.
** Ovintiv Inc. closed the previously announced all cash sale of substantially all its Uinta assets, located in Utah, to FourPoint Resources, LLC, for approximately $2 billion.
** Tesla (TSLA) stock sank as much as 3% Tuesday, reversing premarket gains on the first trading day since the inauguration of Donald Trump after the president scrapped a pro-EV policy put into place by his predecessor in an executive action late Monday.
** In his last days in office, former President Biden approved federal funding to support rebates for energy-efficient appliances in more than 20 states, including more than $500 million going to Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
** Volkswagen adds profit sharing and a 14% pay raise to cover cost-of-living increases in a four-year contract to now-unionized employees at the company’s vehicle factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
** Exxon Mobil and Chevron explore the possibility of building gas-fired power plants equipped with carbon capture technology to supply power to data centers in Texas and elsewhere.
World
** Billionaire Alex Gerko’s quantitative-trading firm XTX Markets is investing more than €1 billion ($1 billion) building five data centers in Finland to underpin its growing use of machine learning.
** A new 20 MW wind turbine designed for floating applications was recently successfully hoisted in China, setting the stage for its testing phase. The state-owned company CRRC has declared this new unit the world’s largest power-class floating wind turbine, marking a significant advance in the exploration of ultra-large offshore wind turbines.
** Tata Motors, India’s biggest electric car maker, is betting that locally manufactured EV batteries will help it maintain its edge in an industry where competition is intensifying with new launches, its group CFO said in an interview.
** Finland’s President Alexander Stubb said there’s no conclusion yet on whether recent repeated damage to undersea cables in the Baltic Sea was sabotage.
** Wind power has collapsed to less than 1pc of Britain’s electricity supply as some of the stillest weather in years hits the UK and Europe. The nation turned to natural-gas powered electricity.
** A record 47% of the European Union’s electricity now comes from solar and other renewables, a report Thursday said, in yet another sign of the growing gap between the bloc’s push for clean energy and the new U.S. administration’s pursuit of more fossil fuels.