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 2,090 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 24 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
Bataille: CCS costs $40-60 per ton for pure CO2, $80-120 for post-combustion
“Typically the numbers we work with is if you've got pure CO₂ to work with, you probably have 40, it's 40 to 60 dollars per ton. But if you're using, doing post-combustion with a clean flue gas, probably 80, the end application will be 80 to a hundred dollars p…”
Jenkins: Corporate self-sanctioning stranded 1.5M barrels daily of Russian crude exports
“Already we're starting to see, I think the estimates are about a million and a half barrels of oil a day, which is, I think on the order of one or two percent of the global market of what normally would have been Russian crude being exported not finding a buye…”
Jenkins: 50 BCM of US LNG displaces one-third of Russian gas imports
“50 is enough to displace about a third of Russia's imports just with US LNG over the medium term.
and that 15 BCM is about a 10th of the Russian imports right now.”
Jenkins: Doubling EU heat pump deployment replaces only 1% of Russian gas
“And even in the short term, if you look at like the current EU strategy for this year, you know, they're talking about doubling the amount of heat pump deployment next year, and that's enough to reduce the consumption of natural gas, I think by about, if I'm n…”
Atkinson: Distribution utilities operate with customer-level grid data delayed by hours or days
“And so it's really normal for distribution utilities today to have a view of their grid that's at least two hours old and often
You know, more than a day old at least as regards to what's happening at the individual customer level.”
Rivest: Humidity management uses over half of AC electricity on average
“But it turns out that humidity is using on average a little bit more than half of the electricity of our air conditioner.”
Rivest: Air conditioning is the leading cause of electrical grid blackouts
“I don't know if ice solves the electricity consumption and CO two emissions part of the problem, but it certainly solves a really important problem about air conditioning, which is that air conditioners are the number one cause of blackouts on the electrical g…”
Rivest: Indoor CO2 levels above 700 PPM impair strategic decision-making
“People were looking at how CO₂ levels were impacting the cognitive function of building occupants, and seeing that strategic decision making and deep thinking were really impeded by Higher levels of CO two. And by higher, I mean like, 700 or 800 PPM. Not reall…”
DeWitt: All US commercial nuclear waste fits on one football field
“Nuclear power has produced, you know, a lot of energy for decades right? Producing 20% of our energy for, well, I don't, 30 plus, 40 plus years, and then before that as well. And the amount of waste it's produced would fit on a football field, being like, you …”
McCauley: There is "essentially unlimited capital" trying to invest into ESG
“There is essentially unlimited capital right now that's trying to get into ESG. It's amazing. It's a wonderful thing to see. So much capital from all around the world is trying to pour into renewable energy.”
McCauley: Renewables performed better than gas during Texas power outages
“And even in some of the Texas outages, in general, the renewable, renewable energy assets tended to perform better than the gas or thermal assets.”
Lacey: Imperial Valley could yield 600,000 tons of lithium annually
“600,000 tons of lithium could be extracted from the valley every year, enough to completely transform the global supply chain.”
Olmedo: Imperial Valley solar boom left hundreds with useless training certificates
“They promised the same thing, and now we ended up is with hundreds of people with certificates that are useless. Certificates for solar that, where there are no jobs.”
Replacing Chemical Feedstocks Requires Half of the Global Sustainable Biomass Supply
“Currently the chemical industry uses something like 30 exajoules of energy, of fossil energy, for feedstocks, just for feedstocks. And the International Energy Agency estimates that the total amount of biomass available for use for energy everywhere on Earth i…”
Lipman: Downstream processing accounts for most industrial biomanufacturing costs
“Most of the cost actually comes in the downstream processing. So after you grow up these cells in these big steel tanks the vast majority of costs come after that phase where you have to process this wet biomass and spin it down and treat it and purify it.”
Shah: Wall Street banks admit DOE loan diligence is harder than theirs
“When I go to New York and talk to the big money center banks on Wall Street, they Often we'll say that the process of going through the loan programs office is as hard or harder than going through their process, and therefore, if someone successfully gets thro…”
Lubershain: Solar makes clean electricity the world's cheapest non-firm power
“And, you know, in fact, the falling cost of solar has made electricity and clean electricity, you know, the cheapest levelized non-firm energy cost in the world”
Rutherford: Total climate impact of flying is triple its CO2 alone
“So if you look at the total climate impact of flying, it's about Three times larger than carbon dioxide alone.”
Rutherford: Waste fats and oils can meet just 2% of fuel demand
“So we think overall maybe about two percent Of overall jet fuel use could be met by diverting these waste fogs from existing uses to aircraft.”
Rutherford: Airbus plans build/no-build decision on hydrogen planes in 2025
“They are planning to make a build, no build decision in 2025. So they're going to review the technologies between now and twenty-twenty-five, decide whether or not to build these planes, and then it becomes sort of a rush to mature and deploy all the technolog…”
Rutherford: Supersonic aircraft are 5 to 7 times more carbon intensive than subsonics
“Overall, you know, the estimate is that the aircraft themselves will be about five to seven times as carbon intensive as comparable subsonic designs.”
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…”
Naam: Uber, Lyft, and WeWork burned more capital than cleantech
“If you look at, you know, some real darlings of The tech VC world, companies like Uber, or Lyft, or WeWork, you see companies that have burned through an enormous amount of capital, far more than most cleantech companies ever have or ever will.”
Lubershain: Large data centers add 10% to 30%+ to mid-sized utility loads
“For a mid-sized utility, most of the kind of, Hundreds of megawatt scale data centers we're seeing today would add 10%, 20%, 30%, or more if we're getting up to gigascale data centers to the utility's total load.”
Kann: Utilities are asking regulators for rate cuts due to data centers
“We're now seeing the first, like, announcements from utilities of going to regulators and requesting rate decreases as a result of large loads in their territory. We've seen a few of those now.”
Lubershain: Energy accounts for 5% to 10% of data center operational costs
“Energy is a pretty small share of the total cost of goods sold for that That data center, right? It's something like five to 10% of the total cost.”
Janous: Data centers spurred massive civic investment and job gains in Quincy
“There was a fantastic story just in the last week about Quincy Washington building a fifteen million dollar aquatic center and they have a hundred and fifty million dollar state of the art school and their unemployment rate has gone from like 29% to six percen…”
Janous: Electricity prices did not rise for 100 years during grid expansion
“Electricity prices did not go up for a hundred years as we massively expanded the grid.”
Wang: Equivalent battery backup requires over 10x the footprint of diesel
“Like, any kind of battery configuration with the same kind of duration, you're talking about more than 10 times the footprint, whether lithium ion or otherwise.”
Wang: Diesel generators produce dirty power needing extra buffering for GPUs
“The power quality coming out of a diesel generator tends to be very dirty in terms of the voltage waveforms for your AC. And if you have spiky loads, it tends not to respond very well, so you have a lot of voltage sag or over voltage. So all that is very chall…”
Wang: Voya starts instantly unlike diesel's 5-10 second cold start
“Basically instant cold start, just like a battery, whereas a diesel generator often will take five to 10 seconds to get to Full power from a cold start”
Wang: Battery and EV innovations make metal fuel systems cost-competitive
“Things like just basic breakthroughs in power electronics with Tesla and with battery energy systems all driving power electronics and inverters to record low cost levels now makes a system like this very affordable, whereas 10 years ago it would have been muc…”
Wang: Nearly every US aluminum smelter has shut down
“And in the U.S. In particular, almost every single aluminum smelter has shut down. There's, I think, maybe only one left operational in the U.S. These days.”
Wong: Over half of utility study time goes to cleaning data
“So studies today, I would say half if not more of the time, especially for distribution, is on cleaning up data.”
Wong: Grid congestion is preventing utilities from scheduling planned maintenance outages
“The grid is getting so congested that if we do worst case scenario all the time we are, the utilities are beginning to struggle to find time to take the grid into contingency for planned work.”
Wong: Utilities lack operational closed-loop feedback until FERC-level post-mortems occur
“Currently, there is no closed-loop feedback until you have a post-mortem. You have a, an event that drives an investigation that needs to be reported back up to FERC.”
Wong: Utility planning studies rarely feed into real-time operations
“Of course, each utility might be different, but that is a very, very rare scenario, that they, these study assumptions and results actually feed into operations because they're measured by the different results and KPIs and all that kind of stuff.”
Tillis says major North Carolina lithium deposit stalled by low market prices
“I've worked hard for years to get a permit for one of the largest deposits of lithium, Spongamine, in North America, which is only about 45 minutes outside of Charlotte. We got permits there. What we don't have are prices that make sense to go ahead and drive …”
Labor ranks behind power and community pushback as data center bottlenecks
“Power and is, is the biggie, and the community has raced up the list pretty quickly. You know, didn't think we'd be at the White House six months ago talking about who pays for infrastructure on the grid, but we are. And right after that would be labor.”
Hawkins: Gigawatt-scale campuses are now standard in data center planning
“It is completely normal to talk about gigawatt campuses today.”
Hawkins: Data center industry secrecy originated purely from early security requirements
“Our industry grew up being secretive. Not secretive because we had anything to hide from anybody, but think about the first two significant customers for large-scale data centers. It was the financial institutions and it was the government, and they were secre…”
Kann: 10 GW of batteries capped ERCOT prices below $250/MWh
“We hit a new net load record in ERCOT because it was a hot day, and we had 10 gigawatts of batteries dispatch, and so prices never got above 250 bucks a megawatt hour”
Hade: Grid interconnection queue wait times reach up to nine years
“If you want to build a utility scale battery in PJM today, and you submit your interconnection application to get in the queue, on average, you're waiting about six years right now. In Kaiso, you're waiting maybe nine years. In ERCOT, you're waiting maybe four…”
Quantum computers have not yet demonstrated dramatic performance gains over classical systems
“From a performance perspective, they haven't demonstrated what we would call you know dramatic performance gains over classical counterparts. It's still in the phase where some people would call them toy problems.”
Kann: Google's energy team is multiples larger than other hyperscalers
“I think Google's energy team is probably a multiple of the size of the next hyperscaler. Just the number, the sheer number of people they have dedicated to it.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Google and Amazon drove bulk of 150 GW utility load pipeline
“The bulk of these contracted loads, I think at the end of 25, we had like a 150 gigawatts the PPL, you know, in, in, in Pennsylvania. That's mostly Google and Amazon. They're the ones sort of scouting all of the utility markets and you know, putting deposits a…”