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
Battery storage will experience heavy supplier attrition similar to solar market
“And we expect to see something similar in the battery storage and other clean technologies, so that's why”
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…”
Dell: Base Power will deploy 100 megawatts monthly by late 2026
“We think by this time next year we'll be deploying on the order of a hundred megawatts a month.”
Guernsey: Lack of smart meter data access throttles residential demand response
“When I think about the growth of our residential portfolio and what's, I think you used the term rate limiting there it's the lack of access to, and I'm going to air quotes here for the listeners, smart meters, right? So we deployed all these smart meters, we …”
Reinhardt: Fixed pyrolysis facilities break unit economics compared to mobile units
“When you start moving away from a mobile piece of equipment into a fixed facility, You do get some economies of the construction, but you actually take on a lot more risk in every facility that you build. You have all the balance of plant, you have permitting,…”
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…”
Reinhardt: Biomass is best utilized for carbon content, not energy
“What's interesting about it is that relative to almost everything else, it's very carbon rich. And so the use cases that rely either on the chemical availability of carbon or on, ah, the sort of physical availability of carbon, those, or like in the case of ca…”
Reinhardt: Removing carbon is cheaper than $2,000/ton building decarbonization retrofits
“It's gonna cost, like, 2000 dollars a ton for me to go, like, tear down a building and rebuild it with, like, a proper HVAC system that does, like, heat pumps, you know, it's like, and have clean concrete, like, you know, at some point you get down to this, li…”
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.”
Kann: Geoengineering is too cheap to support large venture market sizes
“It's actually hard to get to a big market size for it, ultimately, because it is so cheap. Like, I don't remember exactly the number, but we did an episode on this, like, I don't know, a couple years ago, and it was something like a couple billion dollars migh…”
Kann: Make Sunsets' rule-flouting balloon releases are the wrong approach for SRM
“There is another startup called Make Sunsets, which a lot of people have heard about, who has decided to just do SRM brazenly in the open, kind of flouting all rules and regulations to the extent that they can. I actually went to a party a couple years ago whe…”
Kann: Rising electricity prices are the biggest risk to EV adoption
“To me, you know, the biggest risk to EV adoption right now, above all else, is rising electricity prices.”
Kann: A US nuclear power renaissance will happen despite realistic timeline hurdles
“I'm now very optimistic about it. I'm realistic about the timeframe of it, I think. Which is, a lot of people are not, but I do think it's going to happen.”
Kann: Being green and more expensive is insufficient for climate tech demand
“The big lesson of the current state of affairs in climate tech is that in a lot of the subcategories of the market,
Being clean, being green, whatever, is insufficient.
Being ex but clean particularly if it's ex but clean and more expensive.
Is just not eno…”
Sivaram: 50-100 GW of AI Data Centers Cannot Be Built Without Flexibility
“We've got 50 to a hundred gigawatts of latent AI demand in the pipeline. It's just not gonna get built unless you have this capability of flexibility.”
Sivaram: AI data centers could consume 25% of US electricity by 2035
“Data centers, which today are about four percent of American energy consumption, AI data centers are about five gigawatts of load, grow to 12% by the end of the decade. AI data centers could be anywhere up to 50 or even more gigawatts, to 25% of American load …”
Chinese sodium-ion prices will undercut LFP by 2030, Mossberg predicts
“From the quotes and what we're hearing from the suppliers, not just cells, but also materials, we see a really low-risk pathway to the crossover point on price with LFP coming somewhere between twenty-twenty-eight and twenty-thirty out of China.”
Waiting 4-5 years cedes sodium-ion economy of scale to China
“So if we wait for, Four or five years to get into this game, we're going to be in a similar place that we are today on LFP, but, ah, today at least, you're not facing such a huge, ah, economy of scale challenge.”
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…”
Second-life EV batteries require just one to two years to become profitable
“The life of the second life battery on the grid is, it's certainly long enough to be economically valuable, and that, in order to make economic sense, it's really one or two years, hundreds of cycles, low hundreds of cycles.”
Redwood repurposes retired EV battery packs without opening them or removing modules
“We do a very brief electrical inspection. Something like five minutes, cell balance impedance check, and we literally wheel it out to the field where we have a spot for it and plug it in. So we are not opening up the packs. We are not removing the modules. We …”
Second-life EV batteries excel in four-to-twenty-hour long-duration grid storage
“We can certainly play in the two hour, four hour markets with repurposed EV packs, second life packs. Where we see them really starting to shine, though, is in the longer duration. Markets. So four hour, eight hour, maybe longer, maybe 20 hour. And that's beca…”
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.”
Lubershain: New nuclear power will not scale in US until 2035+
“I don't think we're gonna see, we might see a little bit, you know, in the 2030, early 20 thirties time frame, but I think for the most part we're talking 2035 and beyond when we, when we'd actually have new nuclear power at scale coming online.”
Dumoulin-Smith: Solar leasing volume will rise in 2026 despite market contraction
“20, 26 is going to be, again, I would call it extraordinarily dynamic in a market which you could argue the market itself is going to decline in absolute terms. And yet for the incumbent leasing companies, arguably their volumes on a discrete basis are going t…”
Dumoulin-Smith: Loan-dependent residential solar installers will be phased out
“The individual installers who had been principally selling loans and had sidestepped this whole conversation to a large extent. That's really going to continue to be phased out, and in many ways, what I would argue to you is, like, when you look at, you know, …”
Dumoulin-Smith: Residential solar is no longer a growth sector
“It doesn't appear to be a growth sector anymore. It's a sector and, you know, overall volumetric decline potentially for several years in a row.”
Data center developers are crowding out sites for new U.S. manufacturing electrification
“I can tell you for certain that it is getting harder and harder to find a site to put any of that stuff because there are data center developers hunting around the entire country trying to find anywhere where that is possible. So it's making it, and that's dif…”
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…”
Kelty: Tariffs to force domestic battery production increase EV prices and stifle demand
“Like, if you want, if you're really trying to encourage domestic production, ah, in the US, you would put in tariffs to increase the cost overseas, and you'd, you'd incentivize local production. The problem with that is that your cost would end up going up hig…”
Kelty: Tri-chemistry EV battery market will persist over the next five years
“So we see a future over the next five years where you're going to have these three chemistries.”
Stark: Chasing industrial waste heat is a waste of time
“Waste heat is a waste of time. It's actually limited this industry for some time, because people are chasing after a small increase in COP to be able to justify and minimize OPEX, but what they've inadvertently done is, It's essentially driven a massive increa…”
Sharp: Advanced reasoning models force AI infrastructure into tier-one hubs
“As you see bimodal, some of these more advanced reasoning models where a token isn't just generated against a prompt, and then you consume it, and it's done. A token may be generated inside of an AI world and go through multiple models to ensure that, you know…”
Sharp: Power and financing do not exist for top AI growth projections
“Where, you know, the power, the amount of power, and even the amount of financing required to meet these upper end projections, it doesn't exist, right?”
Sharp: Data centers built for spiky training runs will face major failures
“There's going to be some probably written about very big challenges and failures where they wanted a total capacity block, but they couldn't support the densification, or they were just building for the spike. It was very spiky, but the longer term utilization…”
Brough: Gas turbine lead times will not get much worse
“I actually don't think they're going to get much worse. I think all of the OEMs are, in fact, I know all the OEMs are working like crazy to try and shorten up their lead times, or at least make sure they don't get worse.”
Kann: The US lacks end-user demand for 1,000 new hyperscale data centers
“And I will state categorically, I don't think there will be a thousand new Hyperscale data centers in the United States anytime soon. I don't think there's actually that much demand for it.”
Hoyland: Geothermal will add more firm capacity than clean competitors by 2035
“And so in terms of adding low-cost, firm, renewable energy in the next five to 10 years, we really think there's a chance to add more with geothermal than any other competitive form.”
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: Ocean Minerals avoids U.S. waters due to weak investor legal protections
“We, as a company, for example, are not inclined to explore in, ah, US territorial waters, ah, because our investors are not given the kind of Assurances and rights that we would get in other areas that would allow us to get a return on an investment if we were…”
Smit: Cook Islands seabed mining is 2 to 4 years from production
“We probably two to four years away from first production is, is where we are in the cooks.”
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: Ocean Minerals project will yield ~$500M annual free cash flow
“The mining system CAPEX is around five hundred million dollars you know, the processing plant probably around two billion dollars but what,
For that investment, do you get in return for your project? So, you know, our project is in anywhere between three and f…”