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 2,696 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 148 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
Yedvab: Halting global warming would cost $20 billion annually using Stardust
“Essentially at current level to stop war, to stabilize temperature, to stop warming at the current level, and again, the level is changing all the time, but essentially you'll need Well, let's say you'd say two million tons of our particles, just to give you- …”
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…”
China has enough capacity to meet half of global car demand
“China has enough capacity today to supply half the world's demand for cars, and it's not out of the question that one day China could be Capable of producing all the cars for everybody in the world.”
The US is essentially the only nation effectively blocking Chinese cars
“So we are basically more or less the only nation in the world that effectively blocks Chinese cars.”
Chinese AV makers are commercializing faster globally than their US rivals
“The U.S. Leads in technological innovation, but China, once again, is quicker when it comes to commercialization. Not only inside China, but we're seeing the Chinese autonomous vehicle makers move into the Middle East, and in the U.K. And Germany now, moving q…”
Chinese automakers will inevitably enter the US market via JVs or acquisitions
“Potentially, but I think realistically it's like gravity or water. The Chinese are going to find a way in and it may be by acquiring Stellantis or a Nissan or a plant inside or rebadging. It's a leap motor, but it's badged a Dodge and people start to show.”
Fulgham: Structural fossil generation declines in India will happen closer to 2030
“But we do expect that it will still take a few more years for that trend to really be structural. So it'll be closer to 2030, where we'll be seeing normal years of demand growth and falls in fossil generation at the same time in India.”
Fulgham: China faces significant coal generator overcapacity for years
“China is very much moving into an, into a time where they will, for most of the year, there will be significant overcapacity of coal coal generators as well. So yeah, a big change in the role that China is using coal. And that will be a feature for years to co…”
Fulgham: India's coal generation will peak 3 to 4 times lower than China's
“And that means we think that India is going to top out or peak its coal generation, both in absolute terms and per capita at a level that's three to maybe even four times lower than where China's peak was.”
Fulgham: India may meet all new power demand with clean energy by 2030–2035
“Where we could even see as soon as 2030, that structural point where all of the new demand is already met by clean power sources. And that means that not just fossil generation, but also coal generation would not need to grow beyond that. Now it might not be e…”
Panthalassa wave data centers achieve 99.8 percent availability with minimal batteries
“In all of our optimizations, we can be achieving for payloads, you know, we can be achieving with very little battery, like, 99.5, 99.8% power availability with far less battery than you would need for an equivalent solar installation, for example.”
Panthalassa designs deliver wave power at 3.5 to 4 cents per kWh
“We have designs that are two cent per kilowatt hour, On the power. And we, the optimum tends to be, you know, given everything I was just describing, the optimum tends to be in the four cent, three and a half to four cent per kilowatt hour range. But keep in m…”
Panthalassa expects lower AI chip failure rates at sea than on land
“In many cases, we believe that the reliability of the chips, the failure rates will actually be lower on our platform because we can provide much colder cooling temperatures than is typical on land, and we have no oxygen. We eliminate the oxygen from the paylo…”
Bulk of AI energy consumption will power long-running background processes
“There's a whole class of like super latency sensitive applications where you wouldn't want to use us. But that's not where the bulk of energy will be going. The bulk of energy will be going to very long running processes that are churning, churning, churning t…”
AI reinforcement learning energy demand probably already exceeds traditional pre-training
“And this is an area that is becoming huge in terms of energy demand. It'll, it will, The probably already is bigger than what we have historically considered training, you know, pre-training”
Pacific Fusion on track to achieve net facility gain by 2030
“And a number of companies are saying they'll do that in the next couple years. We're on track to do that by 2030.”
Linville: European fertilizer production may never return to 100% capacity
“And unfortunately at this point in time, we're sitting in 20, 26. I don't know that we will ever see a hundred percent in Europe again.”
Linville: Global Fertilizer Prices to Stay Above Average Through Spring 2027
“And ultimately speaking, we could see some dips here and there, but I think the entire structure of this marketplace stays higher priced than average, probably through at least spring of 27.”
Cohen: No regular driverless highway trucking service operates today
“There's not a regular driverless service for trucking on highway that exists today. And that's 10 years after we've really put serious effort into the space.”
Hershman: 85% of solar labor is mechanical, not skilled electrical
“If you think about a solar project,
You know, probably 85 to 90% of that is really, you know, labor and mechanical labor, right?
You are, we're putting posts in the ground, we're bolting together racking systems, and we're installing modules.
And then, you kno…”
Vahdat: AI footprint will favor many medium data centers over gigawatt hubs
“It'll really come down to geographic locality and probably a medium number of medium-sized data centers. Sorry for the whatever lack of precision there, but medium number of medium-sized data centers augmented with a small number of large data centers.”
AI token costs will asymptotically approach the fundamental cost of power
“I think the answer will increasingly become yes in the future as the cost of inference, the cost of token generation asymptotically approaches the cost of power, which is the only real operational expense input into the Into the cost of intelligence generation…”
Nolan: Advanced reactors will surprise on deployment speed for AI demand
“We think that they're going to surprise everyone in their deployment speed and scale up, and, you know, just looking at the landscape of energy demand in the U.S. We haven't grown the grid for decades and yet now we have this huge surge of demand for data cent…”
Nolan: General Matter will displace adversarial nuclear imports by 2030
“Building enough capacity there to satisfy HALU through the next decade, and then enough LEU capacity to displace adversarial imports into the US. And so that's the scale of it. That's where we're doing it. Timeline is, you know, Before end of decade.”
McAvoy: ERCOT battery storage prices will rebound within two years
“And so we see cyclically in another couple of years, the prices will start to come back in ERCOT and people will start to make money again.”
Shafer: TerraPower and Oklo sodium fast reactors will require waste conditioning
“Any of the sodium fast reactor designs, so your TerraPower, your Oklo, things of this nature, this would be A conversation where you need to have, at a minimum, a waste conditioning component to this, and if you're a company like Oklo, that's very much thinkin…”
Kann: Almost none of the 50 GW data center pipeline is off-grid
“There's like, 50 gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation and development at data centers, right? And they, and some people have interpreted that to be, oh, 50 gigawatts of off-grid data centers getting built. It's actually close to zero of those that are true…”
Kann: 300 MW data centers have lower cost per FLOP than edge
“My guess is, you know, your 300 megawatt data center on a fully loaded levelized cost of flop is just gonna be cheaper.”
Elder: Early off-grid data center projects fail to maintain 90% uptime
“When we, we've heard some of the early data from some of the off-grid projects that have been built so far, the ANIC data suggests they're not able to stay above even 90% uptime yet.”
Elder: A 4-square-kilometer orbital data center would sustain hourly debris strikes
“If you scale that up to a single floating thing that's four kilometers, four square kilometers large, you can basically expect to have a piece of space debris hitting that you know, data center every hour.”
Elder: Substantial AI model training will happen in space within 30 years
“In 20 years or 30 years, there's gonna be a lot of AI models being trained in particular in space”
Araque: Super-hot geothermal will achieve $50 to $100 per MWh globally
“The higher outputs will be a big part of bringing those LCOEs down, and we see a hundred dollars per megawatt hour at the meter, no matter where you are in the world. Now, that includes the shallow and the deep systems. If you look specifically at the shallow …”
Araque: Quaise will achieve 25-30 MW EGS flow test by end of 2026
“For us in particular, the project in Oregon gets that flow test by the end of this year. By the end of twenty-twenty-six, Quaze has a commercial-grade Injector producer per EGS system producing 25 to 30 megawatt equivalent electric output from a flow test.”
Araque: Quaise will run first supercritical geothermal flow test by 2028
“From there in twenty-twenty-eight, so two years later, we'll do another version of that, that is not at three miles, but a little bit deeper and above the 400 degrees Celsius or so. We're basically walking up the temperatures of that site to unlock those outpu…”
Kann rejects Musk's claim that orbital data centers will be cheapest soon
“Because I think that orbital data, I mean, Elon says he thinks that they will be the cheapest way to get new compute in, like, three to five years. I do not think that is possible. Not in that time period.”
Kann predicts US electricity prices will rise over the next three years
“But I could tell you, I think over the next three years, you know, electricity prices are probably going up, not down.”
Roberts predicts recycled minerals will become cheaper than mined within 20 years
“I would just say that my, I guess my prediction would be that in 10 years, maybe or in 20, that just a unit of critical minerals drawn from recycling will be cheaper than a unit of
Mind.
I think.
I think.
Eventually.
Like, I think it will end up being our prim…”
Roberts: A rogue actor could test solar geoengineering cheaply and go undetected
“You could stand up and do a reasonably large scale test on your own without a ton of money, arguably without being detected doing so by the world.”
Kann: Solar geoengineering could deliver 0.5°C cooling for two billion dollars
“The rough estimates, just to an order of magnitude, are that, at least what I've seen, it might cost a couple billion dollars to deliver something like a half a degree of cooling, half a degree centigrade of cooling.”
Baglino: Solid-State Transformers Will Replace Passive Ones
“I believe that solid-stage transformers are going to replace passive ones.”
Baglino: Data center rack voltages will reach 800V+ with SST architecture
“Now the backplane voltage of the racks will be 800 volts or even higher. And then you can use a SST based solution to go from medium voltage, 34 KV all the way to 800 volts with no gray space rooms with UPSs and power distribution panels and anything like that…”
Baglino: SSTs eliminate 70% of data center electrical components and footprint
“And you can remove 70% of the stuff in the in the electrical diagram and a similar amount of footprint”
Baglino: Solid-state transformers can match traditional transformer costs while adding grid functions
“An SST can have a cost similar to a traditional oil-filled transformer but at the same time provide functions that would be That would be provided by popcorn components around the transformer. Functions like overcurrent protection, fault isolation, what an aut…”
Siegel: New large-scale gas power plants will not arrive before 2030
“Large scale gas is a 20, 30 plus new resource.”
NRC rejected Oklo's application over safety and accident information gaps
“So, the thing that NRC denied for Oklo was that they submitted a combined license application, so this is for that parallel step where you don't do a separate design certification, you sort of submit a combined operating license and construction permit applica…”
Most nuclear developers will miss DOE's July 2026 criticality milestone
“I don't think a lot of reactors really are on pace for that July fourth milestone because it's an extremely aggressive milestone, and I think it's a little unfair to the nuclear industry actually to sort of set these very aggressive milestones when the reality…”
First advanced nuclear reactor will supply US grid power by 2032
“I'm pretty bad at making predictions, but I would be surprised if by 20 32 we haven't seen Real new advanced reactor electrons on the grid. There may not be many, and it'll probably be just one reactor but it'll shortly thereafter be followed by, you know, a s…”