** A defiant Nicolás Maduro declared himself “the president of my country” as he protested his capture and pleaded not guilty on Monday to the federal drug trafficking charges that the Trump administration used to justify removing him from power in Venezuela.
** Vistra Corp. says it’s buying Cogentrix Energy in a deal estimated at $4 billion. Vistra Corp. says it’s buying Cogentrix Energy in a deal estimated at $4 billion. Cogentrix is indirectly owned by North Carolina-based Quantum Capital Group, which bought the company from Carlyle Group in early August, while Carlyle bought the company from Goldman Sachs in 2012.
** Baker Hughes , an energy technology company, announced Monday the successful closing of the sale of its Precision Sensors & Instrumentation product line to Crane Company . PSI includes the Druck, Panametrics and Reuter-Stokes brands, and the Company had announced the divesture in July 2025.
** After months of speculation, AT&T confirmed Monday it will exit its longtime home in downtown Dallas in a move that will have huge ramifications for the city and the wider region. It’s moving headquarters to Plano.
** NextEra Energy, Inc. announced that members of the senior management team will participate in various investor meetings throughout January. They plan to discuss, among other things, long-term growth rate expectations for NextEra Energy.
** Tech companies and developers looking to plunge billions of dollars into ever-bigger data centers to power artificial intelligence and cloud computing are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don’t want to live next to them, or even near them.
Beginning in January, Duke Energy will implement changes to customer bills reflecting investments to recover from damage caused by Hurricane Helene, strengthen the electric grid, maintain and upgrade power generation assets, and serve a growing customer base in South Carolina.
World
** OPEC+ will likely maintain steady oil output at its meeting on Sunday, OPEC+ delegates said, despite political tensions between key members Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and the U.S. capture of the president of smaller producer Venezuela.
** A Chinese nuclear marvel under construction is making headlines for safety, redundancy, air pollution savings, and the ability to provide power to 5 million people. The Zhaoyuan Nuclear Power Plant in coastal Shandong will have six reactors on site. The generators will replace 16.8 million tons of coal and prevent 50.9 million tons of heat-trapping air pollution yearly, Nuclear Engineering International reported.
** Planned to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, China’s Circular Electron Positron Collider (CEPC) was meant to be about 100 kilometers or 62 miles long. That’s much bigger than CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with an approximately 27 kilometer circumference – or nearly 17 miles. These systems, especially the LHC, play a huge role in studying how the universe began during the Big Bang.
** Africa’s new gas frontier will be dominated by Nigeria’s “Decade of Gas,” Senegal-Mauritania’s cross-border hubs, Mozambique’s FLNG buildout, and Tanzania’s long-awaited LNG framework. Indeed, LNG exports from sub-Saharan Africa are forecast to surge by nearly 175% to hit 98 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year in 2034 from 35.7 bcm in 2024.
** Many households and businesses in south-west Berlin face days without electricity after high-voltage power lines were damaged by a fire which city authorities said Sunday was a result of a politically motivated attack by “left-wing extremists.”