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 606 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 124 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: Mineral shortages could cause 5-to-10-year stalls in EV adoption
“It's that we'll have like periods of more like five years or 10 years where we do have a shortage and the shortage doesn't translate to we can't sell any more electric vehicles. To higher costs for electric vehicles. And that translates to lower demand. And th…”
Hade: A catastrophic power grid failure will occur in the United States
“A catastrophic grid failure is going to happen, and when that catastrophic grid failure happens, the question's going to be, why didn't we think about resilience more?”
Houser: IRA incentives are insufficient for wind deployment without permitting reform
“Necessary, but not sufficient. It helps get the generation economics right, but unless permitting reform and interest rate declines materialize, it's unlikely that it'll be sufficient to drive the amount of wind deployment growth that we need.”
Yeagerson: EV grid value derives from power capacity, not deep cycling
“The value of these batteries is going to be more in the power than in the energy, and it's going to be more in the capacity than in the KWH, right? So you're gonna have, the value is that these things are gonna be available and, you know, maybe sometimes used …”
Yeagerson: Aggregated EV fleets will become highly dispatchable grid capacity resources
“If you have a million thermostats and you've done it 20 times, then actually it's more dispatchable than a discrete peaking resource. And I think you're gonna find that with vehicles as well. It's gonna be very fungible, it's gonna be very predictable, we're g…”
Vijendran: Central space solar beam will likely reach 200 watts per square meter
“Part of the beam, especially the central part of the beam, will likely be exceeding safety limits up to perhaps a couple of hundred watts per square meter.”
Grogan: First commercial seabed mineral recovery will occur around 2028
“I think probably around twenty-twenty-eight is, is a fair guess.”
Lubershane: Decarbonized grid storage needs will fall closer to 47 days
“So, you know, between the minutes of energy storage we have today and 47 days, I think we're going to fall probably actually ultimately closer to the 47 days level, ah, than even minutes, hours, or just a few days worth of storage.”
Larson expects gas plant capacity factors to plummet by the mid-2030s
“We see that going down into, like, the twenties. Because wind and solar are coming on at such huge volumes in their variables. So you're running these gas plants in a much different way by the mid-twenty-thirties.”
Larson: Most gas plants will reduce capacity factors instead of installing CCS
“Most of the gas is just going to ramp down instead of installing carbon capture.”
Schneider: A Snow-Free Sierra Nevada May Be Only a Decade Away
“And I think that the urgency around those reservoirs has increased as some of the science has become more clear that the prospect of a snow-free Sierra is something that unfortunately is probably not hundreds of years away, but is, you know, something again th…”
Bartholomew: California will ban fossil heating equipment in seven years
“California's gonna be banning this stuff in seven years, so start the transition now when there's a lot of money and incentives going.”
Kugelmass: Advanced chemistry nuclear reactors will not deploy until mid-2030s
“The ones that are most realistic, even by their own admission, by the way, to be built in the next five to 10 years, are the ones that use the traditional proven reactor technology and don't introduce some sort of physics chemistry or material science innovati…”
Sachs: EVs will provide up to 25% of grid services by 2030
“We expect by 2030 that EVs will make up somewhere between a fifth and a quarter to that contribution.”
Friedmann: Ammonia power generation will be limited to select Asian economies
“I do think it's going to be unusual to It's going to be big in those economies, but not the rest of the world. India is not going to do this. The US is not going to do this. South Africa is not going to do this. They have other options. And so ammonia is a pow…”
Friedmann: Maritime shipping will use a mix of methanol and ammonia by 2050
“But in twenty-fifty, I think we're going to end up with a blend of both, in part because we're starting already with methanol. People are making investments in methanol ships and methanol bunkering because they want to decarbonize rapidly by twenty-thirty. And…”
Waste-oil aviation fuels cannot scale to meet double-digit jet fuel demand
“Today's generation is based on waste oils, fats, and greases. As you mentioned, Shale, they compete with food crops. They don't have great greenhouse gas reduction. Oh, and by the way, they don't scale. We're just, there's no way we're going to get to, you kno…”
Chase: Global Polysilicon Shortage Will End in Early 2023
“We think that this, the polysilicon shortage, we strongly think will end maybe in the next three months, although I've been saying that for a while.”
Kann: Interconnection may be the biggest bottleneck to the energy transition
“Like, I think interconnection may end up being The single largest bottleneck to the energy transition, or even climate tech across all things”
Jenny Chase: Solar will be built for green hydrogen production by 2030
“And that's even before you start thinking about, are we going to build solar to make hydrogen? And I suspect that by 2030 we are, just because we've got no idea how else to manage the problems of intermittency and how to decarbonize steel and fertilizer.”
Lubershain: Electrifying heat could triple cold-climate peak electricity demand
“And so what this might do in cold climate environments is, is Basically shift peak demand from the summer to the winter and increase the peak by about three X.”
Reed: Decarbonizing the grid requires at least doubling transmission capacity
“The scale that we need to decarbonize the electricity system means we need to get twice as much transmission capacity or more. In the coming decades.”
Fleece: Relaxing hydrogen correlation rules will increase gas burning and insecurity
“In fact, if you have super relaxed rules, which you would base purely on renewable energy credits, or maybe guarantees of origin with no form of additionality whatsoever, you would actually Increase energy insecurity, because you'd be burning more gas than if …”
Fleece: Cheaper renewables abroad will drive industrial production out of Europe
“So I think we will, in the end, see some industrial shift out of Europe, just because it'll be, some countries have natural competitive advantage in, in, in access to cheaper renewable resources, and thereby,
Making their hydrogen production costs lower.
and …”
Fleece: Imported ammonia will be used directly rather than cracked to hydrogen
“I think, at the end of the day, what's going to happen is that ammonia is going to be sold into international markets for, as ammonia.”
Kann: Electrolyzer winners will be determined by scaling speed, not paper specs
“One of the other lessons from solar was like the best technology on paper did not necessarily win out. What won out at the end of the day was who could get to scale and who could manufacture quickly when the market was ramping. And I think we'll see something …”
Yergin: Russia will become China's dependent junior partner within four years
“Being cut off from technology will show up over three or four years, and it will have lost its most important market, so I don't think it's going to be an energy superpower in the way that it's been in the past, and it's going to be very dependent on China. An…”
Yergin: EV battery recycling will not supply enough minerals by 2035
“The issue is you won't have that many electric car batteries to recycle in the time frame because, you know, you're going, we're in twenty-twenty-two now, you know, going into twenty-twenty-three and you're looking at twenty-thirty-five. That's, 12 years.”
Beard: Geothermal will fail to scale if mired in climate lawsuits
“Geothermal is going to carry the baggage of a hundred years of fighting between the hydrocarbon industry and environmental and climate groups, and that, navigating that I mean, it will be incredibly important to, you know, making sure that we can achieve fast …”
Mukhopadhyay: Fleet turnover caps 2050 hydrogen aircraft penetration at 6% to 12%
“And so our projections suggest that even though hydrogen aircraft could service a third of passenger aviation, the actual market penetration is probably going to be more like six to 12% by 20 50. Because of that slow fleet turnover rate.”
Jenkins: The IRA will not materially boost near-term US EV sales
“The total volume of credit of a vehicle sold is not really going to be affected by whether or not they can claim this credit in the short term. So we just assumed the trajectory in our modeling follows Bloomberg's Bloomberg New Energy Finance's trajectory for …”
Jaffe: Lithium shortages will reduce non-China EV demand by 5% to 10%
“The EV demand outside of China, because China is going to be less affected by this because the Chinese investment in lithium has been has kept track with future demand requirements in twenty-twenty-five. But outside of China, we think that we have pulled back …”
Jaffe: Manganese-rich cathodes could become the most common EV chemistry by 2030
“Manganese is a inherently cheaper material and is going to end up, if they can make that middle bucket work really well, is going to be the, I think the most common
Chemistry of choice for cars by the end of the decade.”
Jaffe: Lithium metal batteries will hit 150 GWh by 2030, mostly non-automotive
“I think that lithium metal batteries are gonna result, are gonna be about a 150 gigawatt hour market by the end of the decade, but they're gonna be in other things outside of cars, mostly.
They'll just start to be appearing in cars at the end of the decade.”
Jaffe: Vehicle-to-grid integration is the future of EV battery deployment
“What I think is the future is vehicle to grid. And the, if you truly do have a million mile battery, the idea that you can use the Not just to drive it, but as a stationary storage device while it's in the car, becomes a very real prospect.”
Jaffe: Battery industry will nearly double every year for 5–6 years
“The industry is literally increasing by almost doubling every year. And we'll continue to do that for the next five or six years and doubling off of a huge base now.”
Kann: Supply crunch creates opening for alternative grid battery chemistries
“And I think this is creating an opening For a bunch of alternative chemistries, flow batteries, sodium batteries, zinc-based batteries, metal air batteries, a bunch of other technologies that, that do look really interesting on paper and have specs that lithiu…”
Visioni: 20 years will not be enough to scale CDR effectively
“I do not think personally that in the 20 years are going to be enough to scale CDR solutions in a really, in a way that would really make an impact.”
Visioni: Rogue geoengineering planes could simply be shot down
“This could be another one of the things where it is maybe unlikely that a single actor could do it because, as one reviewer once pointed out to me, you can shoot the planes out of the sky.”
Friedmann: Governments will soon mandate priority uses for biomass, disrupting contracts
“Pretty soon, there's gonna be some loading order priority, which a government, a municipal government, or a state government, or a federal government, comes out and says, you know, first use of biomass is for X, second use of biomass is for Y. And when that ha…”
Lubershane: Decarbonization will trigger intense competition for waste biomass
“You need new dedicated land growing crops for that biomass, and I, you know, jury's still out, right, but I'm skeptical we're going to see that happen, and what that means is actually you have a run not, not on new land, but probably a run on what's called, wh…”
Kann: Solar power prices may stay steady or rise over next few years
“Though the long-term trajectory for solar is probably still going to be cost declines it's possible for the next couple of years, at least, we will see steady to increasing Prices for solar projects or for electricity from solar”
Kann: Sustainable aviation fuel will ultimately displace less than 50% of demand
“What portion of 100% can we get to with sustainable aviation fuel? I don't have the number for you exactly because it's contingent on a bunch of these other Sort of like upstream questions, I think, but I don't think it's 50%, ultimately.”
Kann: Carbon removal cannot reach gigaton scale without policy mandates
“So the obvious example of this is carbon removal, where I think anybody who looks at this would admit that in the longterm, this market does not scale without substantial policy intervention. Like this has to become mandated in some fashion or another. Otherwi…”
Shah: EV boom will starve grid storage of lithium-ion batteries
“A lot of lithium ion battery capacity is going to be unavailable to the grid capacity marketplace once autos are ramping up.”
Shah: Non-lithium battery chemistries will reach commercial scale within five years
“I think we're actually five years away from all of those technologies being available at scale to the marketplace.”
House: Nickel prices will drop below $30 per kilogram by April 2024
“These prices will not, I would bet against nickels being at 30 dollars a kilogram two years from now, because two years ago it was less than 20, and there were plenty of good opportunities, good projects out there, new projects that would work at 20.”
House: Elevated long-term lithium prices will constrain the energy transition
“We are confident the lithium price will stay, you know, elevated in the long run, not related to the current spike, but just in the long run, elevated, because there will be constant demand pressure, and in fact, I'm, you know, sort of concerned about it. I th…”