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.
why aren't all 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Ball: Green tech startups falsely assume two-cent renewable power at 100% capacity
“If you're going to be in climate tech, you want to be green, and so you're almost certainly tethering yourself to a renewable source, which means your capacity factor isn't going to be a hundred percent. So it's kind of like having your cake and eating it, too…”
Kann: Very few asset-light energy startups produce massive venture outcomes
“For all the talk that I often hear, I'm sure many of you hear from many of my peer venture capitalists about asset light, low capital intensity startups in this space, The reality, in my humble opinion, is that there's actually very little historical evidence …”
Lubershain: Clean hydrogen producers' price sensitivity prevents US market turnaround
“Hydrogen, anyone making hydrogen is not going to be a price insensitive buyer. They're very price sensitive. They want the cheapest clean power. I don't know. I, I'm not personally super bullish on this making, helping make hydrogen make a turnaround”
Lubershane: Capitalizing alternative tech in mature climate areas paralyzes deployment
“There are some areas, though, where I do think that the mousetraps we have are good enough, and actually are likely to get better incrementally on their own, such that funneling a lot of capital into trying to build a differently better mousetrap is probably a…”
Lubbershane: Battery cost will not constrain vehicle electrification, but density will
“Cost of batteries to some degree, although I think we have increasing confidence that cost of batteries is not going to be the constraint on basically electrifying any class of vehicle, but density of batteries definitely does matter.”
Lubbershane: AI's impact over the next five years will underperform market expectations
“I'm actually Someone who's in the camp of taking the under on how impactful AI will be at least in the next, let's say, five years.”
Kann is skeptical LLMs will fundamentally change climate tech and energy
“I have generally been a bit more skeptical than most, I think, that it would change, fundamentally change at least, the things that I spend my professional time on, which is to say climate tech and energy.”
Kann: Soil carbon removal fails on measurement, permanence, and additionality metrics
“The bad news is that on all the measures that we really care about when we think about quote unquote quality for carbon removal credits, these practices are pretty challenged. Measurement and verification, permanence, additionality, and so on, which doesn't me…”
Kann: Cleantech 1.0 deep tech Series A returned $153M on $1.4B
“In that first wave of clean tech venture capital investment a decade ago, early stage series A investors plowed ultimately around 1.4 billion dollars Into startups that were in the categories of material or chemical or process innovation and hardware integrati…”
Kann: Base Power raised $1B Series C at $4B valuation
“Base is a relatively young company, but they're moving very fast, and just yesterday actually announced possibly the largest Series C in history, certainly the largest in the energy space. They raised a billion dollars, with a B, At a four billion dollar post-…”
Retail electricity rates in the United States will remain broadly inflationary
“My conviction is growing stronger and stronger. The rates are going to be somewhat inflationary, Broadly across the board for a while.”
Ball: Modular ammonia costs are driven by upstream hydrogen and nitrogen feedstocks
“I think we saw this a lot in the modular ammonia space where, you know, the secret sauce is on this low pressure, low temperature, relatively reactor. And that's a really nice to have, but what, you know, we found, you know, doing our own internal work is that…”
Thiel: Early techno-economic models should focus on error bars, not detailed design
“It's better or it can be helpful just to put error bars and understand the sensitivities on things earlier on and go down the deeper, more detailed design rabbit holes when the higher level stuff is fixed.”
Kann: Founders should confine magical thinking to technology leaps, not input costs
“So try to isolate your magical thinking to the technology leap that you need to take in the first place, because that is within your control much more so than the inputs that you're gonna get.”
Lubbershane: Electrifying LaGuardia would cause 10x-100x more disruption than renovations
“I feel like in order to upgrade LaGuardia to electrify or to add, you know, hydrogen fueling in some capacity, the amount of disruption would be 10 to a hundred times what I saw LaGuardia during, you know, the past seven years as they upgraded a terminal to be…”
Bowe: Energy Impact Partners does not treat AI as a standalone sector
“I think we see it, ah, in a number of ways, but not in its own category, largely. So we see our existing companies leveraging it to make their businesses more efficient. We see new companies who, it's a fundamental of their product, and then, you know, we obvi…”
Eggers: Climate VC portfolios will soon feature core AI product companies
“I'd be surprised if we and EIP and others like us don't have in two or three years at least a couple of companies who have, you know, an AI co-pilot or something where AI is the core offering of what they're doing.”
Kann: No universal financing solution exists for FOAK climate hardware
“And yes, there have been some attempts at solutions here, but I would argue nothing truly scalable yet across technology types that has emerged and is a universal solution.”
Kann: Decarbonization is a transition to go short oil and long mining
“So to a first approximation, I think that a big part of decarbonization is basically a transition from the extraction of fossil fuels to the extraction of minerals. If you've got a sufficiently extended time horizon, then the bet is to go short oil and gas and…”
Lubershane: Hydrogen roundtrip power-to-power efficiency tops out at roughly 35%
“At the end of the day the round trip power to power efficiency for hydrogen, just as a storage medium, is probably gonna be in the range of, like, 20 to, at most, maybe 35%.”
Kann: Energy storage has more tech innovation than almost any climate sector
“I mean, there's probably more going on. From a technology standpoint in energy storage than maybe any other space in energy tech or climate tech, because it crosses over. I mean, we're going to talk about a bunch of technologies to store energy on the grid. Bu…”
Lubershane: Renewable energy demand will marginally impact global steel production
“The total impact at least according to the analysis we've done on say the steel market is meaningful and especially maybe meaningful in, in some regional contexts, North America being one of them, but it's kind of marginal in terms of sort of global steel prod…”
Kann: EIP Climate Tech Index surged 97% since 2020 vs NASDAQ's 62%
“So, as of now, since the beginning of twenty-twenty, NASDAQ is up 62% as of this recording, and our Climate Tech Index is up 97%.”
Kann: On-grid, off-grid, edge, and space data centers will probably be built
“Massive data centers on the grid, massive data centers off-grid, small data centers on the edge, huge data center clusters in space. Each of these might get built. Actually, each of them probably will get built”
Kann: Heron Power Raised $140M Series B Led by a16z
“For disclosure, I'm an investor in Heron, and I have been since their first external round. And actually, just this week, Heron announced a hundred forty million dollar Series B, led by Andreessen Horowitz, where we at EIP also doubled down.”
Lubershain: Flat power grid load growth suppressed DER adoption for 15-20 years
“The past 1520 years in the power system, we just haven't seen, till very recently, much load growth. So there just weren't that many places on the grid where there was tremendous amount of pressure to upgrade things quickly. It wasn't all that expensive to mak…”
Lubershain: DER soft costs remained stubborn despite plummeting battery hardware prices
“What we didn't get right was that the soft costs of deploying DERs would not fall, and that's largely the cost of customer acquisition. It's like getting people, getting customers, whether they're homeowners or businesses, to sign up, to put something on their…”
Thiel: Facility installation costs are typically two to four times core equipment
“Thinking about sort of a chemical or a fuel synthesis type process, the core equipment, you know, might only, or the total installed cost of a facility might be two, three, four, even more times the cost of the core componentry itself, and so if you end up foc…”
Shayle Kann: Sublime Systems is building a plant with Holcim and CRH
“So Sublime Systems, where I'm an investor, is so far, I think, pulling off this really complex value chain integration, as well as anybody, but They're building a large commercial demonstration plant in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and they've announced a bunch of …”
Kann discloses EIP's investment in Koloma and his board seat
“So full disclosure we at EIP are investors in Coloma. I'm on Pete's board.”
Kann: Only One of 40 Tracked Climate Tech SPACs Trades Above Merger Price
“Anyway, as of today, out of the 40 companies that I track, only one is trading above its merger price, which is notable in and of itself. That one happens to be MP Materials, which is a rare earth mining company.”
Seven heavy industrial sectors represent one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions
“Steel, aluminum, cement, chemicals, aviation, shipping, and trucking. Add them up, and they represent about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they're the sectors where the existing, fully commercialized, mature, and ready-to-deploy technology wil…”
Kann: EIP closes $485M Frontier Fund for deep decarbonization
“We just announced this week that we at EAP had done the final close on what we call our frontier fund, which is what I've been working on for the past couple of years. It's a four hundred eighty five million dollar venture capital fund. Dedicated to investing …”
Kann: EIP invested in industrial heat pumps and seeks residential deals
“We've already made one investment focused on heat pumps for industrial use, more on that soon, but we're hungry to find more, particularly on the residential side.”