Nat Bullard
Co-founder & CSO, Halcyon · 10 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
analystfounderexecutiveauthor@NatBullard ↗LinkedIn ↗nathanielbullard.com ↗
Previously Chief Content Officer at BloombergNEF and author of Bloomberg Green's Sparklines column, Bullard is known for his annual decarbonization presentation. In 2024, he co-founded Halcyon, an AI-powered platform that analyzes regulatory dockets and utility filings.
128statements → 112claims → 102claims resolved → 86%fully supported → 3.86/5average certainty → 1.62/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 9said about them ↓
88 supported 10 partly supported 4 contradicted 2 not yet assessed 8 not checkable as stated how the 112 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
7 predictions · 105 assertions · 4 opinions · 12 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 112 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 102 are resolved, 2 are not yet assessed, and 8 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 Nat 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
Bullard: Texas 2030 demand forecasts diverge between 1,000 TWh and 1,600 TWh
“ERCOT says, you know what, we could go from, like, a little under 500
Terawatt hours in 2024 to like a thousand by 20 30, right?
So let's call it, you know, up a 110% in that time period.
The transmission service providers on the other hand are like, sorry …”
Their most notable contradicted claim
Bullard: China's apparent oil demand likely peaked in 2023
“In terms of apparent demand, which is what the statistic is called, and it's basically looking at refinery runs in, in China, it's, looks like it's peaked at some point in 23 and the new data that was published as of yesterday morning shows that actually, stat…”
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 Nat Bullard on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Nat Bullard said on Catalyst that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Bullard: Texas 2030 demand forecasts diverge between 1,000 TWh and 1,600 TWh
“ERCOT says, you know what, we could go from, like, a little under 500
Terawatt hours in 2024 to like a thousand by 20 30, right?
So let's call it, you know, up a 110% in that time period.
The transmission service providers on the other hand are like, sorry …”
Bullard: Texas electricity demand will land closer to ERCOT's lower 2030 forecast
“The true number is,
Either somewhere in between or much closer to ERCOT's figure.
I mean, ERCOT has the reason for demand, supply balancing, and upkeep, and everything else to get it really, really accurate in energy terms.
But the transmission service prov…”
EIA natural gas plant cost estimates ignore real-world regulatory and project evidence
“The gold standard here is the EIA's cost of generation publication that it does every couple of years. And they published this just in 20, 24, and the benchmark price, and after, after engineers had looked through it, was somewhere in the range of about 1100 t…”
Bullard: China's apparent oil demand likely peaked in 2023
“In terms of apparent demand, which is what the statistic is called, and it's basically looking at refinery runs in, in China, it's, looks like it's peaked at some point in 23 and the new data that was published as of yesterday morning shows that actually, stat…”
Bullard: ESG acts as a negative screen, not an alpha-generating thesis
“ESG is a set of issues, but it's not the same thing as a set of drivers. You know, they're issues to be aware of, screens and filters on making institutional investment, which is different than A, you know, an alpha case reasoned to invest capital in something…”
Bullard: Battery chemistries will segment by use case rather than one dominating
“In batteries, I think we will see a world where you've got some separation based on use cases. You know, there will be the NMC batteries that get used for hypercars and for aviation. And maybe the LFP battery becomes much more common for your sort of bulge bra…”
Bullard: Carbon removal is inherently a pure cost, requiring regulatory markets
“The challenge is that it is definitionally a cost. Like, it is definitionally a cost to remove carbon. And therefore, like, creating a market around that is a challenge, which is what, you know, the EU ETS did away with that by regulating it.”
Bullard: Clean Energy Transition Index gained 40% in 2025, beating Nasdaq
“Fenced off to the calendar year, 20, 25, and then calendar year, 20, 25 the S&P Global, the Clean Energy Transition Index, was up 40%, rebased value of a hundred at the start of the year, tips out at a 140 at the end. So more than the S&P and the NASDAQ 100, w…”
Bullard: China manufactures 42% of passenger cars, topping Japan's historical peak
“For the first three quarters of last year about 42% of all passenger vehicle manufacturing is in China last year. That's higher than the ratio for Japan ever was back in its heyday.”
Bullard: Planned combined-cycle gas plant capital costs will double by 2030
“You know on the order of, like, more than a 160 active plants, like close to about 80 gigawatts worth of actual capacity, in which the cost of a combined cycle has doubled. Like, twenty-twenty-six deliveries, things that are gonna come online this year, are in…”
Bullard: Tech CapEx has likely not peaked and will rise next year
“This is probably not the peak. Like, most of the estimates based on what companies themselves are saying for their estimated CapEx have a higher number for next year, right?”
Bullard: Data centers represent only 8% of global electricity demand growth
“Space cooling, so just aircon and buildings is gonna be, like, 10% of the total growth. And data centers are right around eight percent.”
Data center power demand marks the biggest shift since initial U.S. electrification
“We're now in a place that we probably haven't seen since the U.S. Was being electrified full stop, where people are showing up and saying, hello, I have one thing that will materially change the shape of load and demand pretty much forever.”
Current grid operators lack the institutional experience to manage rapid load growth
“I don't think that really anyone has got the muscle for this because it's not been in anybody's lived experience really. And so we're having to think about it pretty fresh.”
Data centers tolerate power price hikes far better than industrial steelmakers do
“If you jack the price of electricity, 30% for somebody that makes steel using an electric arc furnace, it will materially impact the cost of the steel that is being made. If you do the same for people that are doing data center operations especially for traini…”
New U.S. natural gas plants cost $2,240 per kilowatt, doubling recent estimates
“We've got about 55 gigawatts of plants. Like more than a hundred individual plants, and way more than that number of different generators. And what we see is that, actually, his number's not bad. 2400 dollars a kilowatt. What we see by twenty-thirty-one, twent…”
Bullard: US energy storage investment now surpasses wind investment
“Solar is just on its way up. You know, it's more than forty billion dollars in the trail in 12 months. And storage now invests more than wind does in the States.”
Bullard: ERCOT cumulative solar will probably overtake wind in 2025
“You know this year, we're probably gonna have more solar installed in toto, cumulative, than wind.”
Bullard: DeepSeek was funded with $5.5M from a Chinese hedge fund
“DeepSeek is an open source, small model. It was funded with 5.5 million dollars from a Chinese hedge fund.”
Bullard: DeepSeek V3 matched Meta Llama 3.1 using under 2.8M GPU hours
“And the sort of benchmark to compare it to would be the Lama 3.1 model from meta, which had four and five billion parameters and just under thirty one million training hours. And deep seek is getting similar results of V three with six hundred and seventy one …”
Bullard: Data centers consumed nearly 26% of Virginia's power in 2023
“Virginia is, you know, 30, just under 34 terawatt hours of power consumed by data centers in 2020 three, and almost 26% of state power already going to that.”
Bullard: Rappahannock received single interconnection requests 4x its peak load
“Rappahannock had this filing in, in Virginia, where they basically are saying, look, like, we are now getting requests for interconnection. That in a single location are bigger than our entire peak load right now. We have a peak load of 1.2 gigawatts. We have …”
The other half of the tape: Nat Bullard's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 4 episodes on Catalyst. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Shayle Kann 8Matt Eggers 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 1 episode
2025 5 mentions in 1 episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Appearances (10)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| More 2026 trends: Solar costs, oil oversupply, and the startup slump | Jan 22, 2026 | 13m |
| 2026 trends: Gas turbines, Texas’ load queue and China electrifies | Jan 15, 2026 | 24m |
| Fresh intel from state utility regulatory filings | Jul 3, 2025 | 19m |
| More 2025 trends: DeepSeek, plug-in hybrids, and curtailment | Feb 6, 2025 | 26m |
| 2025 trends: aerosols, oil demand, and carbon removal | Jan 30, 2025 | 17m |
| More 2024 trends: ESG, carbon certifications, curtailment, and AI | Feb 15, 2024 | 23m |
| 2024 trends: batteries, transferable tax credits, and the cost of capital | Feb 8, 2024 | 28m |
| More 2023 trends: EVs, onshoring, and the three ages of decarbonization | Mar 2, 2023 | 26m |
| 2023 trends: biomass, ESG, batteries and more | Feb 23, 2023 | 21m |
| Will this carbon market boom be different? | Mar 24, 2022 | 25m |