Andy Lubershane
Partner & Head of Research, Energy Impact Partners · 14 appearances on the record.
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Lubershane leads market research and investment strategy at Energy Impact Partners, evaluating clean energy technologies and grid infrastructure to guide fund deployment. He is known for his climate tech industry analysis and his publication Steel For Fuel, covering energy storage and power sector dynamics.
169statements → 115claims → 69claims resolved → 87%fully supported → 3.46/5average certainty → 2.15/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 4said about them ↓
60 supported 5 partly supported 4 contradicted 10 not yet assessed 36 not checkable as stated how the 115 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
41 predictions · 74 assertions · 25 opinions · 28 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 115 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 69 are resolved, 10 are not yet assessed, and 36 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Andy argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Their most notable contradicted claim
Lubershain: Home Gas Appliances With Upstream Leaks Are Worse Than Coal
“If you are to burn natural gas in in an appliance in a home, for example, like a home boiler or in, in, in an oven And you take that two and a half percent leak rate upstream as a given, then it's actually even a little bit worse in the next 20 years from a gl…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Andy Lubershane on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Andy Lubershane said on Catalyst that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Lubbershane: New gas plants are the only near-term option for gigawatt loads
“I mean, if you do need to serve gigawatt scale new loads within, like, let's say the next three, maybe even up to five years, it's really hard to find, to think of another option that will really work, especially if that's, you know, more than very low capacit…”
Lubershain: Most utility service territories have no spare grid capacity left
“In most utility service territories, it's not the case that there's a lot of headroom left on the grid. There's no more headroom left in the grid. There's no more spare capacity in most places, which means that oftentimes you will have to build new power gener…”
Lubershain: EPRI found data centers already slightly lower average customer bills
“And when you do control for other variables that might bias the analysis Epri found that basically, on average, data centers are lowering customer bills a little bit already. So we are seeing, it's not a major impact, it's something like six percent, but data …”
Lubershain: Electricity rates will rise for most people in coming years
“Data centers are absolutely going to be pushing up rates, and other factors, right, in the supply chain. Rates are going up for most people in most places, I think, in the years to come.”
Lubershain: Data center demand shock creates systemic price inflation across electricity delivery
“There's a demand shock and supply chains, like basically every step in the supply chain for equipment, For the electricity system to deploying that equipment and getting it online and hooking everything up is bottlenecked and cannot keep up with demand. And be…”
Lubershain: Special local tariffs cannot prevent data centers from raising systemic power costs
“We're adding a bunch new costs to the system at a global level that there's very little that, basically nothing that your friendly local utility or data center developer can do about, no matter what kind of, you know, special tariff or agreement they negotiate…”
Lubershane: Retail electricity prices will outpace inflation, driving broader inflation
“I have a very high degree of confidence that moving forward, because as you said, all this stuff is, is leading indicators prices are going to rise faster than inflation overall, and because electricity is sort of a Foundational good for the economy. They'll a…”
Lubershane: Multi-year data center growth will force large-scale off-grid power adoption
“And if this data center boom continues for longer than the next three to five years, if it's really a robust trend that is gonna, you know, be, Decade plus, you know, for the foreseeable future, then I don't see any other option besides going to something like…”
Lubershain: The nuclear industry cannot sustain a Cambrian explosion of reactor designs
“There just can't be a Cambrian explosion of new reactors. The, Industrial logic of the nuclear industry just doesn't lend itself to that. I think best case scenario, it's bad for the industry if you end up with, you know, four or five competing reactor designs…”
Lubershain: Geothermal deployment will not truly take off until the 2030s
“I think that the inflection is, is going to be much slower and happen over the next five years, and that geothermal will really be positioned to take off more so in the 20 thirties than in the late 20 twenties.
That's my bet at the moment.”
Lubershain: Ford is moving ahead with $3B Michigan CATL-licensed plant
“Ford has basically said, we're moving ahead with this three billion dollar battery plant in Michigan, where they're licensing lithium iron phosphate technology from CATL, the Chinese battery giant.”
Lubershain: New nuclear power will not scale in US until 2035+
“I don't think we're gonna see, we might see a little bit, you know, in the 2030, early 20 thirties time frame, but I think for the most part we're talking 2035 and beyond when we, when we'd actually have new nuclear power at scale coming online.”
Lubershane: US obsession with novelty created dependence on China's manufacturing scale
“And I think, you know, comparing the US and China, part of the issue with the US is, you know, we really do kind of tilt towards this mindset of novelty and, you know, boldness and daring and restlessness, which are definitely huge assets and strengths for the…”
Lubershane: Startups 20-50% better than lithium-ion repeatedly get crushed
“It's kind of amazing now for over a decade, there's almost a continuous stream of companies I feel like I've seen across a wide range of different approaches to building a mousetrap to store energy that have always been in the 20 to 50% theoretically better th…”
Lubershane: Gen-III+ nuclear reactors are all the industry needs
“So-called Gen-III technology or, you
Gen three plus technology, which is very much an incremental improvement over the light water reactor designs that have come before, is really, in my opinion, all we need.”
Lubershane: Serial deployment of 1-3 reactor designs beats novel nuclear
“If I were the omnipotent energy czar of the country or the world, I would pick
One, two, maybe up to three designs, and deploy them serially and, you know, say we're gonna do 10 of these, and we're gonna see how it works out, maybe 10 of each and we're gonna s…”
Lubbershane: 3x battery density improvement won't make electric aviation viable
“And so I think most people who've taken a serious look at aviation and even considering major step changes in battery density, let's say a three times improvement in density, From where we are today, there's just a vanishingly small share of total flight miles…”
Lubbershane: Battery electrification is not practically feasible for maritime cargo ships
“You can only imagine what kind of additional electric infrastructure would be required to power, you know, large cargo ships at a port and not just providing shore power while they're parked, but actually giving them enough energy to make a journey across the …”
Lubbershane: Maxing out global cellulosic biomass solves only half of aviation demand
“Even kind of optimistically, if you were to max out that resource globally,
And all of it were to go into the aviation fuel market, especially given the growth we're expecting to see in demand for aviation fuel.
we're still talking about probably solving abou…”
Lubbershane: Expensive synthetic fuels make sense to preserve existing vehicle and hub infrastructure
“The more I think if you take decarbonization really seriously, then most likely that is the biggest constraint, upgrading those really expensive heavy duty vehicles, long lived vehicles and long lived hub infrastructure. And probably it does make sense to find…”
Lubbershane: Utilities are postponing coal plant retirements due to load growth
“The first thing that utilities are planning to build to manage their entry into the gauntlet is they're planning to not retire their coal power plants on previously agreed upon or decided upon timelines.”
Lubbershane: Building new natural gas is the easiest near-term option for utilities
“So for any electric utility, for any load serving entity, grid operator who has to meet rising demand in the next, let's call it two to three years, even up to five years, the easiest, most straightforward thing to do at this point is to build new gas fire gen…”
The other half of the tape: Andy Lubershane's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 3 episodes on Catalyst. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shayle Kann 2Nat Bullard 2
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
Appearances (14)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Do data centers actually increase electricity prices? No...and yes | Sep 10, 2026 | 23m |
| Enter the electric supercycle | Jun 18, 2026 | 19m |
| Five big questions about the future of energy | Oct 23, 2025 | 22m |
| Is now the time for DERs to scale? | Sep 18, 2025 | 26m |
| Five big questions emerging from the OBBB | Jul 17, 2025 | 22m |
| The coming robotics wave | Mar 20, 2025 | 26m |
| The better mousetrap fallacy | Sep 12, 2024 | 23m |
| Heavy duty decarbonization | May 30, 2024 | 26m |
| The electricity gauntlet has arrived | Mar 28, 2024 | 25m |
| Navigating the electricity gauntlet | Aug 17, 2023 | 26m |
| Four ways to store sunlight | May 25, 2023 | 36m |
| Unleashing the magic of heat pumps | Nov 10, 2022 | 21m |
| Climate tech’s surprising bottleneck – land access | Jun 2, 2022 | 21m |
| The future of natural gas | Dec 9, 2021 | 30m |