A construction company blamed for a crippling power outage on North Carolina’s Outer Banks faces lawsuits from businesses that are suffering during peak tourist season. PCL Construction damaged three electric cables Thursday while working on a replacement bridge over the Oregon Inlet. All power to Hatteras and Ocracoke islands went out, causing authorities to evacuate about 50,000 tourists. ABC 11 in Raleigh, N.C., reported it could be another six to 10 days before the power is restored.

CANNON BALL, N.D.—Brightly colored tents, campers, and tepees span nearly a quarter-mile along the banks of the Cannonball River an hour south of Bismarck, N.D.. Flags from tribes across the country flap in the wind along the dirt road through the camp. Horses graze on prairie grasses, children run, and smoke from campfires wafts into the cloudless sky.

Peggy Hoogestraat farms with her husband Craig in Hartford, S.D., a town where neighbors watch out for each other and share bundles of homegrown sweet corn. In 2014, when land agents with Dakota Access showed up to survey for an oil pipeline route, Hoogestraat and 14 neighboring families banded together to fight it.

Among the 10 cases heard at the U.S. Supreme Court so far this term, one case about the market for electricity tackles the question of which government literally has the power—state or federal? 

On one side is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which regulates the interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas, and oil on the wholesale market.

On the other is the Electric Power Supply Association, which represents utilities and power generators. It supports policies that foster competition in the retailmarket.

Winter cold this year has driven three dozen people a day through the doors of Citizens for Citizens, a social services agency in Fall River, Mass. They arrive worried, complaining of monthly electric bills $30 to $40 more expensive than expected. “The phones are jammed,” Liz Berube, the organization’s assistant director, says of her office. For the 18,000 or so low-income households Citizens for Citizens enrolls in government energy assistance each year, a bill increase of $40 can be a budgetary avalanche.

Residents of Denton, Texas, a town about 45 minutes north of Dallas, voted last week to ban the oil extraction process known as fracking. Short for hydraulic fracturing, fracking is one reason gasoline prices are falling. But in some places, fracking is not popular at all.

“Do we want our air poisoned with benzene from fracking operations in our city?” an activist shouted at rally in Denton a few weeks before the election as residents yelled back a resounding, “No!”

Small underground nuclear power plants may herald the future for an energy industry under intense scrutiny after Japan’s Fukushima disaster, but America may not see them for many more years due to uncertainties with funding and regulations.

About the size of a couple of semi-trailers, the modular plants could be safer and cheaper than their behemoth counterparts. With factory-built parts that are slotted together like Lego blocks and hauled by train or truck, the plants can be assembled anywhere.