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 618 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: Scaling by strictly one order of magnitude is not universally necessary
“Though going from lab scale to full commercial scale almost never makes sense, I do think that some entrepreneurs that I've seen take as gospel this notion of the order of magnitude to scale up that isn't necessarily true to their technology, right? The real q…”
Yeh: Mainstream infrastructure investors wait until Project Three for $500M checks
“For many of these mainstream project financiers and infrastructure investors, they may not look at this stuff until it's project three. But then at Project Three, they can lean in, and these firms can write five hundred million dollar, billion dollar commitmen…”
Jaramillo: 100-hour lithium-ion storage cannot clear grid energy markets economically
“In the case of lithium ion, Let's say that's roughly a hundred dollars a kilowatt hour. You're adding a hundred dollars for every hour you want to discharge. And the industry normalizes around dollar per kilowatt in terms of comparative resources. So everythin…”
Jaramillo: 100-hour storage provides physical market hedge short duration cannot
“Having a hundred hour duration resource is a physical hedge against price spikes in a way that you can only really financially hedge right now unless you have, again, thermal resources. So it sort of opens up a new A new frontier for market participation in a …”
Woolley: Vertically integrated utilities hold structural advantage for managed charging
“I think it is an advantage because what you do is you create clear line of sight all the way through to the value that's created. So if you are running a managed charging program, say in New York, we work with Con Edison. In New York's service territory, we ca…”
Woolley: Static time-of-use EV rates trigger massive secondary timer peaks
“The next level is, like, maybe you provide a time of use rate, and obviously, in markets like California, we've provided time of use rates. The big con to that is, what you get is, you get this massive secondary peak. You get what's called a timer peak. So you…”
Lovering: Standardized series reactor construction drives down nuclear costs
“Really what, you know, what makes nuclear cheap and where nuclear is cheapest, whether you're looking at history or where it's cheap currently, it's where, you Countries and utilities are building a lot of reactors in series of a standardized design. And the, …”
Kann: Every carbon removal method fails on cost, scale, durability, or verifiability
“The reason for that is, the way that I Think about CDR is that you're looking, your mythical unicorn solution for removing CO two from the atmosphere has four characteristics. It is cheap, which is, you know, let's just call it sub a hundred dollars a ton, but…”
Roberts: Nuclear power is just one firm clean balancing option
“I just want people to see nuclear, not as some sort of special, unique kind of power, but simply one of the options on the table for balancing longer term Renewable energy. One among others, there are other options. There's geothermal, there's longer term stor…”
Kann: Clean tech's high CapEx structure makes it uniquely sensitive to interest rates
“Most clean energy technologies , the thing about them is that they are high capex, low opex... And because they're high capex, low opex, that makes them particularly sensitive to the cost of financing.”
Roberts: Hard-to-decarbonize sectors will be technologically easier than expected
“Hard to decarbonize sectors are going to be easier to decarbonize than I think is expected, technologically speaking. And I think that's been a theme in the clean energy transition now for decades is that the technological challenges turn out to be a lot more …”
Houser: National ambitions drive partisan climate rhetoric despite state-level bipartisan support
“There, elected officials from those states that have national ambitions will, if there's rewards to them politically at a national level, for taking a more partisan view on climate or clean energy then they'll probably do it, but at this, at the state level, t…”
Thiel: New grid storage must hit $100-$150/kWh to compete in 2030s
“The numbers that we've landed on in, in our work are sort of in the hundred to 150 dollars per kilowatt hour total installed system cost. If you can see a path, I mean, a pretty clear path to those numbers with your system, then you probably have a pretty good…”
Cultivated meat may be an easier psychological leap than processed plant-based meat.
“You know, in some respects, I would argue that maybe it's even an easier mental move for folks than it is consuming soybean or wheat products that Taste like beef.”
Visioni: Geoengineering research should rely on modeling over small-scale experiments
“When it comes to the kind of discussion that we need to be having right now, I am a bit skeptical about how much small-scale experiments could move the needle. Whereas, I think that once we're going to go to the point where we've sort of gotten enough people o…”
Yeagerson: V2G capability is three to four times more valuable than V1G
“If you think about V one G value, it's only a negawatt capacity if the vehicle is not charged. And a lot of times what happens, people bring their vehicle someplace, they plug it in, and it's charged, and so you've got basically negawatt capacity for as long a…”
Kann: Time sensitivity makes data centers willing to pay microgrid premiums
“These data centers generally speaking are somewhat price insensitive, but time sensitive. And when you have that dynamic it creates a different kind of an opportunity to say like, well, okay, we got to deliver power sooner, even if it is a little more expensiv…”
Rayford Smith: Utilities naturally prefer acting like low-innovation railroads
“And I think that utilities, like, their natural inclination is to be the railroad because that's the safe and it's the consistent thing that they've always done, and it's explainable to regulators, it's explainable to shareholders, to Wall Street, like, that, …”
Lubershane: Retiring coal plants can be repowered into thermal storage
“All of these coal-fired power plants that are on track to be retired in the next five to 10 years, maybe a little more than that in some cases. And as they're retired, they're sitting there, and they've got, you know, everything you need, basically, to repower…”
Schneider: Scaling hydro requires shifting from megaprojects to distributed projects
“The way in which we're going to increase capacity is, we firmly believe, A shift that moves away from just building megaprojects, and instead looks at building projects that are more distributed in nature, and, which means smaller by moving to smaller projects…”
Schneider: Dam ecological impact depends on water flow design, not size
“That again, as we've dug into this more, is that there, it does, it seems very clear as you dig into the science around the fact that there are small dams that have major negative impacts. It's not a size thing. You could have big dams, you could have small da…”
Moffat: 10–20 year utility RNG contracts beat volatile spot subsidies
“I actually am totally fine with moving gas to a utility at a lower price, because they're usually willing to sign terms, so 10 or 20 years, and so that just makes lots of logical sense versus a highly volatile LCFS and RIN market.”
ESG Became Vulnerable to Political Attacks Because It Lacked Definition
“The problem here, and this is a problem to ESG and why it was so vulnerable to this, is it was not well-defined.”
Climate Investors Should Pressure Energy Consumers, Not Fossil Fuel Suppliers
“We think that engagement and pressure is incredibly important, but that focusing on supply makes no sense at all. Right now, ExxonMobil is like a business with a line out the door and around the block. It really doesn't make sense to go to the guy behind the c…”
Bullard: Mineral processing, not extraction, is the clean tech bottleneck
“You know, the determining step for so many of these things is not fundamentally, you know, acts, access or availability within the earth's crust, but where it is that it gets processed.”
Kann: FOAK project finance funds struggle to scale due to high diligence costs
“You have a hard time getting to scale, because the whole point is that this technology is going to graduate from the type of thing you would do to the type of thing that, that JP Morgan would do. And so you, if you're the one focused on just the sort of first …”
Reinhart: Short-lived pollutants are stronger levers for near-term warming than CO₂
“Net zero by 20 50 for CO two is critically important for managing long-term warming, but we cannot forget about the other pieces primarily around short-lived client pollutants that are going to be even stronger levers towards managing that near-term warming, t…”
Reinhart: Cutting methane cools the atmosphere, cutting CO2 only halts warming
“So when you cut CO₂, you stop warming it, stop warming the atmosphere even more than it already is. When you cut methane, you eventually, over about a decadal time span, start actually bringing that warming down. It's a fundamentally different dynamic.”
Reinhart: GWP 100 metric forces an implicit near-term vs long-term trade-off
“Whenever we compare things on a GWP 100 basis between methane and CO₂, what we are fundamentally doing is actually making a trade-off, one that we're not always conscious of, between near-term warming and long-term warming.”
Jenny Chase: Actual solar deployment consistently exceeds forecaster expectations
“But the history of solar shows that it, there's always more solar than you think there will be.”
Ellis: SCMs can only replace about 30% of Portland cement
“So you can only blend about 30% in before you start reducing, you know, diluting the performance.”
Kann: Bending the heat pump adoption curve requires vertically integrated businesses
“For any one player, any one company to single-handedly bend the curve on heat pump adoption, it sort of has to be a vertically integrated solution of some kind or another”
Steele: Microgrids combine the challenges of off-grid and centralized grids
“I think they have worked in a number of cases, but in some ways they're this hybrid where they have All of the challenges of an off-grid system and all of the challenges of a grid. And so figuring out the financing model, the operational model, like how you ac…”
Steele: Low-Income Consumers Are Aspirational and Reject Poorly Designed Low-Cost Products
“I think anyone who thinks, you know, very, very low-income people are not aspirational is not talking to anyone who's living in those situations. Absolutely people want cool stuff. People want, like, cell phones that are the latest and greatest, and that actua…”
Peterson: Offshore wind startup opportunities are around edges, not turbines
“Turbines is a large company game, right? And so when we look at the interesting areas for innovation in offshore wind, we're really looking around the edges, right? So we're looking at how does one monitor and protect cables under the water? How does one think…”
Slesserev: Conservation Agriculture Is Not Equivalent to Permanent Carbon Removal
“Organic carbon is not necessarily a long-lived sink for atmospheric CO₂, and at some level, I think that's the central thing to keep in mind, is that microbes like to break down organic matter. It's how they make a living and so any one of these practices migh…”
Yergin: Reforming electricity markets during a crisis guarantees structural policy mistakes
“Usually when you do major reforms of something as fundamental as your electric power system, and you do it in the middle of a crisis you're going to make You're going to build in mistakes, so they need to deal with the short-term crisis and then rethink their …”
Yergin: The energy transition shifts dependency from big oil to big shovels
“And that's, you know, in, in, in the new map, the way I phrased it, is you go from big oil to big shovels, because you're going to need so much more mining, and the volume of mining, I think, is just not really recognized.”
Webber: Cheaper energy may drive energy-intensive desalination via Jevons paradox
“The correction to that might be, if you lower the cost of energy, you might end up pursuing more energy-intensive forms of water-like desalination, so it might end up settling out at about the same price. And in fact, that's what we see in many places, is that…”
Webber: Energy emissions and water disruptions form an accelerating feedback loop
“Part of that is one of the deep ironies of the energy-water nexus is that the energy system helps create climate change through the radiative forcing of the emissions from the fuels we use, and the way climate change manifests itself is through changes to the …”
Beard: Scaling geothermal rapidly requires leveraging the entire oil and gas industry
“If we want to go fast, and we want to do this at scale, we're going to have to leverage that entire industry.”
Beard: Geothermal scaling is a human resources challenge, not a technology problem
“Really this comes down in my view To a human resources problem, not a technology problem.”
Chay: Robust soil carbon offsets require physical soil sampling at project locations
“Consensus is you really need to sample your soil in the place that you're trying to quantify outcomes if you want to have a robust quantification that you can use for an offset.”
Kann: Decoupling farming subsidies from carbon offsets kills corporate market demand
“On the downside, you probably lose the market. You lose a big, big chunk of the market, right, who is in the carbon market, not in the business of subsidizing practices they like from farmers somewhere else.”
Jaffe: Treating battery cells as outsourced commodities was a critical OEM mistake
“And that's what we've learned in the last 10 years of the development of the electric vehicle, is that the car is the battery. And it's not just the battery pack. The car is the battery cell. The car is the battery chemistry. And for the car company to just sl…”
Jaffe: The real prize of solid-state batteries is enabling lithium metal anodes
“The real prize with solid state is getting to a lithium metal batteries... You get the most energy dense possible anode you could possibly get With a lithium metal anode.”