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 3,906 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
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…”
Microreactors make zero economic sense without scaled factory manufacturing
“Microreactors in particular do not make sense economically until you're building them in a factory with a plan for shipping those reactors fueled and receiving those reactors, defueling them, those sorts of things.”
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…”
McGinnis: Permissionless plug-in systems can eliminate residential install soft costs
“Permissionless can effectively Put that to zero. Because two of the big components there are three of the big components are permitting labor and CAC. And so think about a buy online motion where a consumer is just going to Amazon and buying one of these and p…”
McGinnis: Rising electric bills will drive mass adoption of DIY plug-in energy
“The more that we see bills go up in the U.S., regardless of what the rules out there are, people are gonna go on Amazon, they're gonna start buying the stuff, they're gonna start plugging it in, and so I think this is coming one way or another, and it's really…”
McGinnis: US will deploy tens of gigawatts of plug-in DERs by 2036
“Again, if you look to Germany, like, doing a gigawatt in a handful of years in what is a much smaller, you know, country than ours, it wouldn't shock me to see tens of gigawatts deployed in the next five to 10 years in the US where that's actually making a mea…”
Burton: Substantially fewer renewables will come online in 2027 and 2028
“And so it really will be in the out years, 27 and 28, where we're going to see substantially less renewables coming online. So, so there's definitely going to be a slowdown.”
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…”
Rountree: Selling low-cost commodities offsets deep tech technical risk
“Why I love commodities is because
It offsets the technical risk we're taking with less market risk, because I know if I'm selling a commodity, i.e., my product is molecularly identical to the competitors, but I have a cost advantage, I know you can sell that.”
AI training data centers run dummy workloads to flatten dangerous power spikes
“What they do in large part, because those spikes are actually problematic, not just to the grid, but to the equipment inside the data center as well. So what they do at least sometimes to manage that is they create dummy workloads. So they keep the power profi…”
Siting distributed edge compute will become easier than 1GW data centers
“I think finding capacity there may eventually become easier than finding the next thousand megawatts.”
80% of AI inference compute will move to the edge by 2035
“So I would say that we could be getting 80% of our compute done locally and leaving 20% of the heavy lifting or the more esoteric, the more corner case compute for the data center cloud. That is, of course, excluding the training. The training will Continue to…”
Modon: Unlimited Industries prohibits change orders in its contracts
“We literally put, like, no change orders in our contracts.”
Modon: Unlimited completes 100% of engineering upfront before committing to price
“We've been able to not only Kind of like remove all that extra risk by taking the definition instead of, you know, doing that at 30%, we can take that definition all the way through a hundred percent.”
Modon: Fixed-firm EPC contracts use scope loopholes to trigger change orders
“Most of these fixed firms aren't really like industry themselves. I mean, we've seen time and time again where it's like a fixed firm doesn't really mean a fixed firm because there's inevitably some way that in the thousand page contract that you assigned with…”
Matthew: Hyperscalers hype power constraints to induce third-party infrastructure overbuilding
“So if you think about that from a power standpoint, my incentive in that scenario would be to talk up power constraints, right? Saying that there's not nearly enough of it. We need to build so much. Like this is the greatest cycle because that will incent spec…”
Gramlich: Hyperscalers fundamentally require full grid connection for five-nines reliability
“My understanding from the hyperscalers and the data center developers is that they all really, really want the Full network transmission service with all of the good, you know, backup and cushion that that network provides to their operations, and the Five Nin…”
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.”
Garabedian: Electric Hydrogen prices European plants just over $1,000/kW installed
“So, we're pricing in the European market today with a total installed cost just north of a thousand dollars a kilowatt. Inclusive of EPC. That's everything from the substation, the civil works, all of our equipment, the installation and commissioning.”
Garabedian: Electric Hydrogen will beat fossil hydrogen costs by early 2030s
“Now, if you take our technology roadmap a little further out, and you think about scale and also improvements we have in our, coming in our technology, along with what we expect to see in terms of continued cost reduction in wind and solar, we think we can get…”
Chubuk: AI cannot reason to breakthrough superconductors from training data alone
“I think it's still true that it would be difficult to just reason your way into a much better superconductor. I actually would guess that there's a law out there that we haven't discovered yet that says that you can't just look at your training set that's diff…”
Chubuk: LLMs already bridge solid-state chemistry and physics better than human specialists
“Like, there was probably a time when a physicist could contribute and be one of the best in the world on many fields of physics, but it's definitely not true today, and this is one of the reasons I think we are very excited about LLMs, because when you talk to…”
Clements: Legal Arguments Strong for Federal Jurisdiction Over Load Interconnections
“And so, I think the legal arguments are very strong in favor of the Secretary of Energy's position here, and in favor of the position FERC would take.”
Lubershain: The nuclear industry cannot sustain a Cambrian explosion of reactor designs
“There just can't be a Cambrian explosion of new reactors. The, Industrial logic of the nuclear industry just doesn't lend itself to that. I think best case scenario, it's bad for the industry if you end up with, you know, four or five competing reactor designs…”
Lubershain: Geothermal deployment will not truly take off until the 2030s
“I think that the inflection is, is going to be much slower and happen over the next five years, and that geothermal will really be positioned to take off more so in the 20 thirties than in the late 20 twenties.
That's my bet at the moment.”
Sridhar: Politics will block taxpayer-funded grid expansions for hyperscalers
“Now, if the grid were to build excess capacity purely to meet this huge demand and expects the taxpayer to pay for it so the hyperscaler can benefit, That politics is never going to fly.”
Sridhar: Grid upgrades cannot match AI power demand within 5–7 years
“Realistically, over a five, six, seven year period, it cannot catch up with the demand base that exists out there.”
Sridhar: High-power AI data centers must adopt captive on-site power
“We are finally building high electricity intensity AI factories. These are, these data centers are AI factories. They have been the exception and not the rule. They are now going to have to follow the rule.”
Sridhar: Inference will account for 90% of AI power load within four years
“Three to four years from now, I predict that 90% of the load will be inference and 10% will be training, even though the 10% in training then will be significantly larger than the 90% training today.”
Sridhar: Data centers will shift to 800-volt DC architecture
“The second pain point that they are working on as we speak is shifting the mindset to an 800 volt DC bus going into Iraq. Let me explain this to you. When you are a large power plant that produces 50 megawatts, 500 megawatts worth of power, because so much pow…”
Sridhar: Sustainability has dropped to bottom-three priority for data center operators
“I would say for pretty much all the data center operators today, the sustainability goal has shifted from being in the top three to being in the bottom three.”
Sridhar: Carbon capture will scale before green hydrogen for power generation
“Carbon capture at scale, hands down, for electricity generation.”
Kann: Data centers will partner with DER aggregators for grid capacity
“We're just starting to see this wave of announcements that are inexorably coming where there are going to be partnerships between hyperscalers or data center operators and the Third parties who do aggregations of DERs to deliver capacity to get data centers on…”