The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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McIntosh: Hardware companies must reshore or vertically integrate key component supply chains
“All these things we're going to need to either reshore or vertically integrate within the companies who are building the end product.”
McIntosh: Electro-industrial supply chain ownership will dictate global military and economic power
“And I think as we, you know, look forward 50, a hundred years, owning the supply chains today are going to have a lot of effects of Who controls both the sort of economic and military powers in, in the future.”
McEntush: Grid costs spike once renewables reach 50-75% penetration
“As you attach more of these sort of renewable resources or sort of these non-reliable resources, while they're incredibly cheap and works most of the time, sort of this long tail risk, you know, once you get to like, 50 to 75% of the grid is gonna become very,…”
Texas deregulation drives massive wind, solar, and battery deployment
“The success of Texas and how much wind and solar and batteries they've been able to connect and why a lot of companies are flooding there is because of this policy that makes it very, very easy to connect new assets.”
McIntosh: US rare earth bottleneck is scale and cost, not technology
“I think the reality is that you know, the technology that China has, America can do. We're very good at engineering. We're very good at doing specific things. And in fact, even like the, you know, recent stuff around rare earths, for example, rare earth separa…”
McIntosh: SpaceX and Anduril vertically integrate by necessity, not strategy
“In many ways, they're vertically integrating by necessity, not strategy. There just isn't an ecosystem of companies that can scale with them.”
McIntosh: US could take decades to match China's industrial supplier ecosystem
“Those are the things that might take years or decades for us to catch up to China. We can do the technology, but everything else needs to grow with it, or else we're just moving the bottleneck.”
McEntush: Modular reactor startups requiring on-site construction remain construction firms
“If you build a reactor in a factory or you build modular components in a factory, but you still need to do construction work on site, you're still a construction company.”
McEntush: Falling power generation costs are offset by rising grid delivery costs
“The cost to generate electricity, the cost of like power, Has dropped immensely. Gas, solar, things like that. But the cost to actually deliver that electricity has increased a ton. And so in net, it's sort of not changed.”
McEntush: Energy consumers prioritize reliability first, cost second, and cleanliness third
“People want cheap reliable, cheap, and clean power in that order.”
Cloud hyperscalers are exploring nuclear energy to ensure data center reliability
“You know, another good example is like data centers, as you noted you know, these regions where a lot of these data centers are located are expecting huge growth in energy demand to the point now that some large hyperscalers are looking at things like nuclear …”
McEntush: Power grid cannot rely solely on one energy source
“So that's why it's so important that, you know, it's not going to be all nuclear, all solar, all wind, or all natural gas, because there are situations where pipes freeze and so it becomes very, very complex and it's not as simple as, you know, just connect as…”
Only 10% to 20% of queued US energy projects actually get built
“Maybe, I think it's like, 10 to 20% of projects are actually built.”
McEntush: Natural gas peakers remain cheaper than solar plus battery storage
“And those are going to be way more expensive to generate that power, but it'd probably be cheaper than using solar and storing it in batteries today.”
NERC highlights energy policy as a top grid risk over next decade
“And there's a separate group called the NERC, which is a semi sort of government associated. But they run these sort of these risk reports. And they have highlighted that one of the key risks for the grid over the next decade is actually policy.”
McIntosh: Electro-industrial stack will drive next industrial evolution by 2026
“My big idea for twenty-twenty-six is that the electro-industrial stack will move the world. The next industrial evolution won't just happen in factories, but inside the machines that power them.”
McEntush: The next-generation power grid will be highly decentralized
“This sort of next generation of sort of what the grid looks like is going to be in a much more decentralized way.”
McEntush: The US lost its ability to build power megaprojects
“And so for the last like 20 years effectively the grid has sort of ossified. We forgot how to build new sort of power plants. We forgot how to build new power projects new loads, sort of large data centers, large factories, large mega projects.”
McEntush: Residential solar installation is cheaper in Germany than the US
“I think it's actually cheaper to put residential solar on your home in Germany than in the United States.”
McEntush: Grid operators must build redundant backup power for wind energy
“Grid offers, like, look at, they look at when it's like great when it's working, but they can't plan for it. They have to build other capacity to supersede that if it's not going to be there when they need it.”
McEntush: Grid load forecasting relies primarily on weather and temperature forecasts
“Most of this load forecast is done by just looking at the weather. Like, they look at, like, basically, like, one of the best indexes, they look at where, where the homes are, like, what, how many people are there, and then what the temperature is going to be.…”
McEntush: China and UAE build AP 1000 nuclear reactors far cheaper
“A lot of the existing AP 1000 technology is quite good, and other countries can do it quite cheaply. China is using a very similar design. The UAE just built one for incredibly cheap.”
US energy demand saw virtually no growth over the past two decades
“And for the last, you know, couple decades, we really haven't seen a growth in energy demand.”
McEntush: US grid outages and electricity price volatility are rising
“We have an increase in outages, a lot of this weather related the price of electricity is now a lot more volatile.”
McEntush: Wind power reliability depends on transmission lines
“People often say, like, the wind is always blowing somewhere, but that only matters if you have the transmission lines to move wind from one place to another.”
Delivery fees now exceed 50% of California residential electricity bills
“Many times and increasingly so in California, the cost to deliver is like over 50% of the bill.”
Over two terawatts of proposed power capacity wait in US grid queues
“There's over, like, two, I want to say there's, like, two terawatts in the queue right now, which means that there's, like, two terawatts of power generating capacity, a nameplate, at least, like, what it could max out at, waiting to be connected to the grid.”
Utilities must manually drive trucks to locate broken power lines
“And when something like that happens, they don't know where the line actually fell. They know, like, on what type of power line it fell, but not specifically the spot. It actually often takes trucks driving through to see where these damages occur.”
McEntush: The electric grid will undergo significant decentralization
“I think one of the big theses we have is that there's going to be a decentralization of the grid.”
Household appliances like stoves will soon incorporate built-in batteries
“Your stove is going to have a battery likely.”
McEntush: Solar and wind energy are cheaper even without subsidies
“They are cheaper. Even without subsidies, LCOE is often a metric thrown around, which is the levelized cost of energy. Solar and wind are really, really good.”
McEntush: Scaling renewable energy requires proportional grid storage expansion
“And so if we're going to increase the amounts of solar and wind on the grid, we also need to proportionally increase the amount of storage. And this is going to be very significant challenge.”
McEntush: Grid batteries will expand from short-burst balancing to daily load-shifting
“Increasingly as batteries enter the grid, which as you've noted from the chart, it's not that significant penetration yet. It will start to be able to cycle over sort of a daily timeframe. So, as I mentioned earlier, taking energy from the middle of the day an…”
McEntush: Batteries cannot solve multi-day or multi-week grid storage needs
“Now, the problem with batteries is they can't solve these sort of longer duration spells. So I mentioned this case where if your grid has a huge wind component, it might be not windy for weeks. Unlikely, but it's possible. Batteries are not very good at storin…”
McEntush: Natural gas will remain a dominant US power source
“And will likely continue to be a major piece of our grid as long as our domestic production continues and there's no sort of radical change in, in energy source.”
McEntush: Gigawatt-scale nuclear development requires government financial backing
“It really takes a government, which is why Nationally, you know, like Japan and France and even, like I said, our regulated utilities in the United States, a lot of our nuclear power plants are, you know, government supported. It's very, very hard to take on t…”
McIntosh: Space supremacy will define future industrial and military power
“Space supremacy will be the measuring stick of industrial and military power for the foreseeable future.”
McEntush: Energy projections show a massive gap between supply and future demand
“All the projections seem to indicate a huge gap.”
Enron originally pushed policies that created deregulated US energy wholesale markets
“The other type are deregulated markets, which started really becoming a thing over the last like 20 or so years. Largely pushed forward originally by Enron and pushing these policies of sort of these free markets where energy was going to be traded in these wh…”
McEntush: U.S. total grid generating capacity is roughly 1.2 terawatts
“I believe our grid today is about 1.2 terawatts. So this is almost effectively double what our current national generating capacity is.”
McEntush: Electrical transformer lead times currently exceed one year
“Things like transformers are, you know, have crazy lead times, like over a year or more, not to mention that it's increased in price dramatically.”
Hydroelectric dams account for over 90% of current US energy storage
“Previously, in our country, almost all of our energy storage, I think it's like 90 plus percent today, is through hydro, through dams.”
Despite having nuclear power, South Africa's electric grid faces daily blackouts
“There are a lot of countries that were once had great grids, South Africa, great example. They have nuclear power, but much of the day in South Africa, the grid is actually completely down.”
McEntush: US electrical grid is split into three major interconnections
“So, so I think the most important idea is that the electric grid is not some sort of monolithic entity that, that is, is, you know, the same across the United States. It's actually made up of three sort of major interconnections.”