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 418 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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 …”
Guernsey: Virtual power plants deploy faster and cheaper than new gas plants
“It absolutely should be more affordable if the alternative is going out and building a new natural gas power plant. For one, not only are you going to, like, open up the catalog and see that it's backordered till twenty-twenty, or sorry, not twenty-twenty, twe…”
Lubershain: Distributed natural gas gensets are near-perfect resources for grid operators
“The closest thing to a perfect resource from the perspective of a grid operator is, you know, a flexible, you distributed genset of some sort that can turn on and off really quickly, can ramp, ramp up and ramp down very quickly. And ideally, if it's a natural …”
Kann: Electric stoves are a small household load not worth prioritizing
“It is a small load in the house. If you, what you care about is, you know, electrifying stuff, you should, you really push people toward electric vehicles and electric HVAC and stoves don't really matter at the end of the day. So I just don't get it. I don't g…”
Kann: The current climate tech downturn fell steeper than Cleantech 1.0
“One difference between this time and last time in my mind is that the fall from glory has been a lot steeper and faster, because it was really driven by a political change, the change in administration, and then the swiftness with which that new administration…”
Kann: Plastics are a smaller climate challenge because petroleum remains locked inside
“And I don't worry personally about the fact that plastics use petroleum inherently because that petroleum is locked up inside the plastic. It's not being emitted as CO two into the atmosphere generally. So I think that plastic is a climate Challenge, but I thi…”
Kann: Uneven Tax Credit Eligibility Poses Greater Risk Than Full Expiration
“To me, the trickiest thing is, is if we're entering this period wherein some projects will qualify for a substantial, like it's 30% tax credit. If you still get the, you know, domestic content bonus, coal communities, et cetera, like you can get, they're big c…”
Lubershain: Nuclear will never beat natural gas on pure economics
“Nuclear, my own view is really never gonna look great from a pure economic basis on paper, relative to, say, just more natural gas power generation, unless we have, like, significant gas, natural gas resource constraints, which we might have bottlenecks in, in…”
Data center power demand marks the biggest shift since initial U.S. electrification
“We're now in a place that we probably haven't seen since the U.S. Was being electrified full stop, where people are showing up and saying, hello, I have one thing that will materially change the shape of load and demand pretty much forever.”
Sharp: Gigawatt announcements are often just 'braggawatts' ignoring real demand
“There's a lot of noise, like one of the things we've been joking about is a lot of braggawatts. Oh, I have a gigawatt. I have a gigawatt. And there's just so much noise out there that you really want to get underneath the workload and the durability of the com…”
Sharp: Pure off-grid bridge power remains an outlier in data centers
“Yeah, I think there's some outliers. Very few of it gets covered in the press because nobody wants to really go on to the market where you, the grid can't meet the customer ramp demands today. I mean, full stop... But yeah, it is an outlier.”
Sharp: Behind-the-meter data center power is merely a temporary stopgap
“Doing behind the meter, you know, becoming a power generation capability, I think is a short term gap. Nobody would be investigating that if we didn't have the constraint.”
Chaset: Carbon dioxide removal is overhyped as governments pull back funding
“I think it's overhyped. I think it's overhyped sort of to the conversation we were having about sort of the consumer pull for big investments. Unless you can really drive down costs, such a sort of meaningful point that consumers are sort of comfortable paying…”
Chaset: Load flexibility is massively underhyped because much flexibility is free
“I think load flexibility though is massively under hyped because a lot of the flexibility is free. Managing when you charge an EV is essentially free.”
Chaset: Policy Uncertainty Makes Capital-Intensive Climate Tech Uninvestable Near-Term
“So I would say none of them because they all require Large capital investments that require certainty and we are in a period of massive uncertainty across the board. So I would actually say I'm fairly bearish on all of those in the near term because I actually…”
Schroepfer: Wave Power Is Probably the Largest Untapped Energy Source
“Wave power is basically concentrated wind energy. And there's a tremendous amount of it out there, and we're harnessing very little of it. So it is probably the largest single untapped energy source on the planet.”
Khan: Industrial Labor Demographic Shifts Will Take Decades to Drive AI Adoption
“It's one of these things, though, that I do think is a big macro driver, but it's not like an, it's like climate change in some ways. It's like, it's going to take decades to play out, and that's like one of the problems with it, is that there's no immediate, …”
Khan: Siting optimization for energy developers cannot build venture-scale businesses
“I do think there is value in that. I don't think you can build an enormous venture grade business just doing that.”
Norris: Faster interconnection is the key value proposition for flexible data centers
“What would really present a value proposition for the hyperscalers and the large co-location data centers would be if you can actually interconnect them to the grid more quickly if they're able to offer this flexibility.”
Lubbershane: Humanoid robotics is 10x to 100x harder than specialized vertical bots
“I think in at least one order of magnitude, maybe a couple orders of magnitude, harder problem than building these kind of specialized robotics as a service.”
Lubbershane: Robotics foundation models lack defensible long-term moats
“I have my skepticism about that About that approach, kind of in a similar way as I have some skepticism about LLMs themselves, which is that I'm not sure about the long-term moat, and I'm also, you know, not convinced that the companies who are building robots…”
AI clean energy efficiency gains outweigh data center power consumption
“Data centers use a lot of energy, but you'll have to use a lot of very dirty energy to compensate how much more efficient you can make the process of identifying Sites for clean energy.”
Koomey: Analysts wrongly use Nvidia sales projections to forecast electricity growth
“And usually what they're assuming is NVIDIA's business plan is our growth forecast. Right? They're just saying, because for AI, they're just saying, well, NVIDIA has this projection for the next few years of how many AI nodes they're gonna sell, and they just …”
Datar: Commercial cultivated meat manufacturing requires hundreds of millions in CapEx
“I would say tens of millions of dollars could make something that's really great right now that would be useful for the whole field. Hundreds of millions, we'd start getting into more, like, manufacturing, you know, in a, like, way that is more than, like, a c…”
Kimber: Reputable crypto players are among the smartest in the power market
“All of our interactions with the crypto folks almost universally, I'd say that the reputable players in the space are some of the smartest and most creative people I've found in the power market.”
Grunwald: Improving ranch land efficiency matters more than cattle feed additives
“It turns out it's not that hard to triple the efficiency, or sometimes even quadruple the efficiency of those cattle ranches, and that moves the needle a lot more than, you know, giving cattle, you know, feedlot cattle, you know, and remember, they're only in …”
Grunwald: Indoor Agriculture Cannot Solve Global Macro Food Production
“I have Some confidence that it might solve the lettuce problem, and I think maybe at some point you'll see it solve the strawberry problem, but I don't see a path for it to solve the food problem. You know, you might be able to replace a couple 100,000 acres o…”
Kann: FOAK remains the only real valley of death in climate tech
“And listen, I think this remains today the real valley of death. There aren't really any other values of death at this point in my mind. The capital stack for climate tech companies is, is actually pretty strong, even in light of the market having shifted a fa…”
Lafarge: Vertically integrated utilities are best equipped to manage distributed capacity
“One of the reasons why utilities and particularly vertically integrated utilities are so well suited to this is that they are the grid operators that can see the whole darn grid at once transmission distribution and generation.”
Klauber: Expiration dates on book and claim systems threaten project finance
“Some of these same nonprofits that are well-intentioned think that it might be better to create an end date, an expiration date for book and claim. Or when there's a certain market penetration, book and claim is no longer valid because of the concerns from REC…”
Janous: Utilities should require proof of capital for gigawatt grid requests.
“If you're saying you're going to build a gigawatt data center, Or you're holding on to a gigawatt of power in a queue position. At some point, you need to be able to point to billions of dollars of capital that you have access to build out that infrastructure.…”
Lambert: Dual-Fuel Heating Is Unnecessary in Any Coastal US City
“There are parts of the country that makes sense. They're getting fewer and fewer, but they do exist. It's certainly not the West Coast of California, or really any coastal city in America at this point, my view.”
Kann: Climate tech TEA modeling is often done poorly, even by veterans
“And we think it is often done poorly, even sometimes by very experienced entrepreneurs.”
McCoy: U.S. mining industry and PolyMet lacked sufficient tribal engagement
“There wasn't enough tribal engagement, I think, by the previous company or in the U.S. In general.”
Climeworks CFO: DAC startups risk destroying industry trust through overpromising
“What we're worried about is what's going to happen if people are not transparent about the challenges is that, that people will lose face at some point, you know, when they say, well, this is just an industry that makes a lot of promises, but doesn't really ke…”
Çubuk: AI models excel at textbook science but cannot generate paradigm shifts
“AI hasn't really done this yet. Even today's best AI models seem to be really good at kind of doing the textbook stuff, you know, like high school, college, but then when you think about being more creative and, you know, trying to shift the paradigm, it's bee…”
Lubershane: Startups are not well positioned to develop sodium-ion batteries
“The fact that it's been largely developed by and is already being scaled up by the exact same large industrial players, battery manufacturers that make existing lithium ion you know, means that it's, You know, I guess it's, I guess it is a better mousetrap, bu…”
Khan: DAC needs more startup approaches despite an impending reckoning
“There's an extent to which I still want more mousetraps in DAC, despite I think what's going to be a pretty painful reckoning in the startup landscape, just because I think we need to find something that is truly cheap enough. If we're going to do DAC at scale…”
Johnson: Geologic hydrogen reservoirs take thousands of years to recharge
“The, this is still, you know, our view is it's still, you're talking about thousands of years. Oil and gas, you're talking about millions of years, and this you might be talking about thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. There are …”
Dell: Mass timber substitution is viable only in North America and Northern Europe
“Really, like, North America and maybe some small parts of Northern Europe are the only places in the world that, like, have the trees. And Everywhere else, if you did that, you would be driving deforestation that would make the whole thing counterproductive.”
Berdichevsky: Sodium-ion makes sense for grid storage, not electric vehicles
“I think sodium ion makes a ton of sense for the grid. I don't think it makes any sense for EVs.”
Berdichevsky: Current Tesla Supercharger density is probably sufficient
“I think the density that exists in the of superchargers today is probably sufficient.”
Belady: Moore's Law made the hardware industry complacent for six decades
“And frankly, it's actually made the industry complacent. Not much has changed over the years in the past six decades. If you look at it, cause Moore's law pretty much gave performance improvements for free.”
Belady: Dispatching data center backup generators could solve short-term grid shortages
“That's something that we could probably use everywhere in the short term. That's a way to solve that, the energy shortage problem. I don't think it's magic. Every data center has generation, backup generation. Why, why can't it be used?”
The Inflation Reduction Act is the greatest jobs bill ever created
“I believe we'll look back and we'll be able to say that the IRA was really probably the greatest jobs bill that's ever been created.”
Commercial fusion power still feels 25 years away, if ever
“In terms of things that have taken longer, I mean, when I was in engineering school back in the mid-eighties, people were talking about fusion power being available in about 25 years. That still feels like, you know, 25 years away, if ever.”
Huang: Chinese EV Self-Driving Is Mostly Similar to Tesla FSD
“In terms of the self-driving features, it's mostly very similar to what you have with Tesla right now with the FSD.”
Janus: Standard 48-Hour Diesel Backup Is Probably a Data Center Relic
“I will say that backup is probably a bit of a relic because when we first started building these data centers, 15 years ago, most of them were relatively small. They were five or 10 megawatts. They were connected at distribution voltage. So the standard was pu…”