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
Black: Fission, fusion, and fracking were all invented in New Mexico
“Fission, fusion, and fracking were all invented in New Mexico.”
Garabedian: Western green hydrogen plant capital costs doubled to over $3/W
“We've seen those capital costs go from You know, an early promise of something like 1500 dollars a kilowatt, buck 50 a watt, to now even over three dollars a watt of capital cost.”
Dell: Base Power offers 25 kWh home battery backup for $19 monthly
“When you sign up with base, you get a 25 or 50, if you offer two kilowatt hour system on your home, that is all yours to use when the grid goes out for 19 dollars a month for the 25 kilowatt hour system and 29 dollars a month for the 50 kilowatt hour system. S…”
Reinhardt: Charm's capex per ton is under half of state-of-the-art pyrolysis plants
“If we look at the capex, for example, of our system today on a, Per dollars capex per ton basis, and compare it to, say, like, state-of-the-art pyrolysis facilities, we are already less than half of that cost on, on a dollar per capex basis, and that will decl…”
Solar and batteries have killed Texas's $9,000 per megawatt-hour price spikes
“The only argument, you know, you ever had for building something like a baseload generator in Texas is that sometimes the price would go to 5000 or 9000 dollars a megawatt hour, but with the massive amounts of solar and storage coming out of the grid, which yo…”
Grid interconnection is faster than building new nuclear in most locations
“Most places you can get interconnected faster than you can build the new nuclear reactor.”
Peak Energy reaches balance-of-system cost parity with LFP today
“We try to depopulate a lot of the subsystems that drive cost, complexity, and energy density loss here. And what that lets us do is actually get to a balance of system cost Despite a serious energy density penalty that is already today pretty much on par with …”
Peak Energy's passive sodium-ion system uses 50x less aux power than LFP
“Just on aux power, we're 50 times, a little bit more than 50 times more efficient. We use 50 times less power than an equivalent LFP system.”
Peak Energy claims $75/kWh NPV benefit over LFP in hot climates
“If you add all that stuff together, we're at about, in a hot region, like let's take like Miami or Phoenix, we're at about a 75 dollar per kilowatt hour NPV benefit on a TCO basis versus an equivalent LFP system.”
NFPP retains 94.5% health at 3,000 cycles versus LFP's 80%
“We got two cells, equivalent cells, same size on test in our lab right now. LFP is at about 26,026 hundred cycles, and it's at 80% state of health. NFPP is almost 3000 cycles same cell, and we're at 95 94.5 percent.”
Piper: PJM accredits 100MW of solar as just 8 to 10MW
“If you bring a hundred megawatts of gas generation, we count that as about 70 megawatts of reserve contribution. If you bring a hundred megawatts of solar, we may count that as eight to 10 megawatts of reserve contribution. You know, very, very conservative, m…”
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.”
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…”
Smit: Trump deep-sea mining order covers international and foreign waters
“And I think the other important thing about the executive order is that it has stipulated that it's not just US territorial waters. This is international waters as well as other exclusive zones.”
Smit: Land-based mines require 4x to 8x the tonnage of seabed nodules
“The other thing to consider is that we are bringing up one ton of material, and in that one ton of material, we are producing the same amount of metal
As you would need to have anywhere between three and five land-based mines. So for them to get the same amoun…”
Smit: Manganese ensures Ocean Minerals' profitability despite cobalt and nickel price crashes
“With the recent crash of the cobalt price and nickel For all sorts of reasons, and that's the topic for a whole different discussion, but particularly those two metals with the depression on their prices, our project remains profitable, and the reason it's pro…”
Nuclear and gas lead times make batteries the immediate grid solution
“Nukes are probably five or 10 or more years out. New gas generation. You can't get a new gas generator for probably four or six years at the very shortest. And so the most immediate and economical solution is really that those renewables and batteries.”
Brown: VPPs cost 60% of natural gas peakers or less
“We believe that a VPP similar capacity resource would be 60% of the cost of a natural gas peaker investment. And honestly, that's probably outdated because now we know that natural building natural gas peakers are even more expensive.”
Brown: VPPs cost 40% of utility-scale battery installations
“And it would be, and the VPP would also be 40% of the cost of a utility scale battery investment.”
Friedmann: Gas with CCS builds in half the time of nuclear
“They can build a natural gas with CCS plant in roughly half the time in which they could build a nuclear plant.”
Friedmann: New gas with full CCS costs $70–$100/MWh in the US
“In the U.S., assuming three dollars per million BTU for natural gas, on a new build, All costs. That means cost of capture, compression, transportation, storage, and permitting. You're looking at 70 to a hundred dollars a megawatt hour.”
Friedmann: Secretary Wright is proposing cuts to Congressionally approved clean energy programs
“We are seeing Secretary Wright propose a set of cuts to programs that were approved by Congress and approved by the prior DOE. In some cases, Congress, I mean the contracts have already been made, and this is part of the broader rescission around clean energy.…”
Stadler: Microgrid power costs reach 3-4¢/kWh including capex over 20 years
“We really get down to three, four cents, including all the capital that we installed there, and we model actually escalation on the electricity side by 10% every year, and natural gas also going up by five percent every year. But still, at the end of the analy…”
Norris: 0.5% data center curtailment unlocks 98 gigawatts of capacity
“At 0.5% flexibility or curtailment of the new data center load, you could add up to 98 gigawatts of new data centers across the U.S. And at 0.25% curtailment of the new load, you could add 76 gigawatts.”
Yao: CATL's CEO projects sodium-ion taking half of the LFP market
“Robin Zhang, the chairman and CEO of CATL, announced basically last November that he expects Sodium Mines to take up to half of LFP's market share.”
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…”
Grunwald: Going vegetarian is climate-equivalent to only cutting beef due to dairy
“Going vegetarian is usually about the same as just cutting out beef, because vegetarians tend to eat more dairy.”
Fernandez: $70B infrastructure funds hold 15-year zero-loss records across all projects
“There is 70, 60, seventy billion dollar infrastructure funds that have a 15 year track record that have never lost money on any project they've invested in.”
Lafarge: Doubling grid capacity is the baseline, not a high-end scenario
“Even if you haircut the forecast growth in data centers and manufacturing by 80 or 90%, you still double the grid. And something I think we need to say more as an industry is doubling the grid is not the high-end reference case here. It's not the sort of what …”
Scheyder: Direct lithium extraction has never worked at commercial scale
“Which has never actually worked on a commercial scale but there's a lot of money being poured into it by researchers across the globe.”
Jaffe: Chinese state industrial policy created CATL, now the world's top producer
“The emergence of CATL, which was essentially a company that was really invented in the back rooms of the industrial governmental complex in, in China about 12 years ago that, and it essentially just, you know, it followed the plan perfectly and is now the larg…”
Jaffe: Northvolt doomed itself by attempting six gigafactories simultaneously
“What they ended up trying to do was build, essentially build six gigafactories simultaneously, which is just an impossible task to handle. And I think that the, you know, that, that the concept of build, build, perfect, and then repeat was not applied. And the…”
Lockmiller: Power is now the primary constraint scaling AI
“Power is the main constraint right now.”
Frith: Normalized US LFP cell production is 8% costlier than China
“For a LFP cell produced in China, 35 gigawatt hour facility you're looking at around kind of 68 dollars per kilowatt hour. So this isn't kind of optimized for these super low prices that we we're seeing today, but Assumes a kind of LFP material costs of about …”
Frith: Northvolt's yield struggles inflated costs and lost BMW's contract
“Northvolt started manufacturing cells on its plant around the end of twenty-twenty-two, I believe. So, kind of, we're coming up to two years now. And if the, you know, media reports are to be believed, they're still having a huge issue with yields. They can't …”
Frith: Chinese battery makers lack international IP for next-gen chemistries
“The technologies that are about to be adopted and, you know, going back to Silicon as an example here, right, imminently going to be adopted in electric vehicles. A lot of Chinese companies don't have the freedom to kind of operate and sell that material outsi…”
Khan: There are more carbon removal startups than meaningful buyers
“Depending on how you want to define it, I'm pretty sure there are more carbon removal startups than there are carbon removal buyers, at least at any scale, like meaningful scale of buyers.”
Bredariol: IEA estimates global flare combustion efficiency at 92%, not industry-claimed 98%
“We at the International Energy Agency estimate that the combustion efficiency of flares globally is at around 92%. That's a much lower number than what you might hear from the industry. They will often refer to 98%, but it's in line with several scientific stu…”
Johnson: Natural hydrogen fields require just 1-3 MWh input per ton
“Our best estimates for a natural hydrogen field is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of one to three megawatt hours of energy in to pull a ton of hydrogen out. So that's one to three megawatt hours of parasitic costs of, you know, running compressors and …”
Dell: No steel company is commercializing large-scale blast furnace carbon capture
“There's very little going on in the world of carbon capture in the steel industry right now. There are a there are no large-scale efforts to commercialize this technology. Like, there isn't a single steel company anywhere in the world that's like, we're gonna …”
BYD's new hybrid technology delivers 2,100 kilometer range for under $15,000
“What they call the DM-F.O technology, which is an interesting technology in that it increased the fuel efficiency to around, like, 80 to 90 miles per gallon. And they made a lot of waves with this 2100 kilometer range claim, which has been verified by, you kno…”
Baglino: China's lithium refining dominance is driven by CAPEX, not tech or labor
“It's not like the refineries are in China because the technology to refine lithium is in China. Like, that's definitely not the case at all. It's purely been, like, the capital investment to build the refinery is the lowest in China. And it's not labor either,…”
Baglino: Over 90% of Battery Precursor Plants Discharge Sulfates Into Waterways
“All the precursor, almost, I want to say all, over 90% of the precursor in the world is for battery cathodes is produced in facilities where the wastewater, the, like, sulfates and that are in the wastewater of that process kind of can just go directly into th…”
Baglino: Global clean grid requires 1.5 TW annual renewable deployment
“1.5 terawatts is the total amount of renewable energy capacity that will need to be deployed on an annual basis to maintain the sustainable energy economy. And that's basically keeping up with plant retirements. So on a steady state basis, 1.5 terawatts is how…”
Shah: California's NEM 3.0 lacks a transparent battery compensation mechanism
“They did the NEMM three point O piece, but there's no transparent way of getting paid for your battery piece.”
DeLuca: Models suggest power-to-liquid fuel costs could undercut conventional jet fuel
“There's a lot of models that suggest that power to liquid, the cost structure should be lower than conventional jet fuel and should sit and be very stable because you're truly using these unlimited resources.”
Friedmann: Announced SAF plants cannot meet the 2027 global airline mandate
“If every Sustainable aviation fuel plant that had been announced were to be built, there would not be enough fuel for the twenty-twenty-seven target. Period.”
Grabow: US-built container ships cost five times more than international builds
“By the 19 thirties, it was up to a 50% premium for U.S. Built ships. By the 19 fifties, a U.S. Built ship was double the cost of one built abroad. By the 19 nineties, it was triple the cost of one built abroad, and today, a U.S. Built container ship is somewhe…”