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
Baglino: Scaling electricity generation is more concerning than electrifying demand
“The demand side I'm less worried about than the generation side, I guess.”
Baglino: A 30% heat pump efficiency boost beats cheap gas on TCO
“There's some folks out there that are saying they can get another 30% Improvement in heat pump efficiency, which now you're really talking about being competitive on a total cost of ownership against natural gas, even in places where natural gas is the most in…”
Kann: AI Power Demand Is Undeniably Slowing Down Industrial Electrification
“I think it is undeniably gumming up the works right now, if you are trying to accelerate electrification of other stuff as quickly as you possibly can, particularly industrial stuff.”
Kann: High power costs, not permitting, drive industrial projects from California
“The, I would say that the limiting factor that I've seen over and over again these days is not as much permitting as it is the cost of power, which is which has become insanely high in California, and that ends up like pushing people out of state more than any…”
Lubbershane: Partial electrification is probably the right path for heavy-duty trucking
“I'll say in general, for the category of heavy-duty trucks, Battery swapping, I think, belongs in a broader category, which I would call, you know, partial electrification, right? There's lots of things you could do potentially with a truck to make it partiall…”
Delta CSO: Aviation must scale SAF faster than wind or solar did
“We've got to outpace Some of those other emergent industries in terms of we don't have decades to get this right. It needs to scale sooner rather than later.”
Steingart: 5-minute charging batteries with zero explosion risk are likely impossible
“So the question is, is how do we have a battery that it gets us a 300 mile range that can be charged in five minutes that has zero danger of exploding, right? And that's probably Impossible, completely, but understanding how and why they explode is something r…”
Moerenhout: The world's best batteries and cathodes are Chinese technology
“If you look today at the best type of batteries, the best cathodes in the world, that is Chinese technology.”
Steingart: Grading spent EV battery cells for second-life applications is not bankable
“It's typically pretty, pretty difficult to justify the cost of grading these cells and estimating their second life. We do a fair bit of that in my lab, and I have to say to date, I think that, that it's probably not a bankable effort yet. I'm not sure that ev…”
Steingart: Graphite battery recycling is hard to justify economically and technically
“Long story short, graphite recycling is in its infancy, and it's pretty difficult to justify from a purity and homogeneity basis, and, you know, frankly, there, there's plenty of graphite in the ground, so, so it's hard to justify from an economic basis recycl…”
Lubbershane: AI's impact over the next five years will underperform market expectations
“I'm actually Someone who's in the camp of taking the under on how impactful AI will be at least in the next, let's say, five years.”
Lubbershane: Major IRA manufacturing provisions will be politically difficult to rescind
“I think it would be very difficult, both, both from a pure political standpoint and from a political economy standpoint, to rescind some of the major features of the IRA at this point that are supporting development of new manufacturing facilities in many case…”
Bullard: Long-term carbon markets need better application of standards, not more standards
“I don't think that in the long run, markets are asking for more standards. They're asking for better application of a number of standards.”
Bullard: AI data center load growth mirrors greenfield smelting era
“I'm planning for industrial load growth of the sort that grids haven't known since maybe they were building greenfield smelting capacities or things like that.”
Kann: Novel biomass CDR ideas carry severe feedstock and scalability risks
“I see a lot of novel ideas around biomass-based CDR, and every one of them scares me specifically because of the question of where is the feedstock going to come from, how is it going to scale, and are there going to be a bunch of negative side effects when th…”
Zou: Carbon accounting is oversaturated and behaves more like consulting than SaaS
“Carbon accounting isn't necessarily a market that needs 200 or 300 players. And also I think a lot of them end up being a bit more consulting advisory based than traditional enterprise SaaS like generalist investors understood.”
Treasury's FEOC guidance forms a strict barrier against Chinese battery materials
“Based on my expectations, this is, it's significantly restrictive. My expectations was there were going to be a lot of loopholes and a lot of ways for this to snake around the FEOC label. But it's a pretty, it is a pretty solid bulletproof way of keeping the C…”
Woolley: Broad rollout of dynamic electricity rates is overly complex for consumers
“You don't want to make the proposition too complex because I mean, I hear a lot about like, well, let's just roll out like dynamic rates to everybody within, within markets. And I'm personally not necessarily a fan of doing that. I think some consumers will li…”
Tech sector climate goals make data center load growth a net positive
“I generally think on balance, it's good because those customer sets tend to be particularly progressive when it comes to climate issues, and they're willing to put their money where their mouth is and take some risks that, that others will not.”
Kann: Going off-grid is never economical with existing macro grid access
“You just don't see that working out economically for any customer who has access to the macro grid.”
Kann: California net metering reforms appropriately value grid-timed distributed energy
“In my mind, high level without sort of getting into the nuances of that specific policy, like that is appropriately valuing those resources. It's saying if you, if the resource can actually alleviate a challenge on the grid, which is a real thing in California…”
Kann: Electric stoves are overhyped because cooking emissions are negligible
“The reason that I think it is overhyped is that from a climate context, I don't think it really matters. Like at the end of the day, it's not, your stove is not a significant load in your home, and so you can electrify it or not, and I guess maybe it matters i…”
Roberts: Geogrids are the cheapest, cleanest way to heat and cool buildings
“And basically, if you can build one of these things, you have what I think is Easily the cheapest and cleanest and most efficient way of heating and cooling buildings that exists in the world, as far as I can tell.”
Kann: The voluntary carbon market is broken and full of vaporware
“I agree that that market is a mess and broken, and there's a lot of vaporware there.”
Hade: IRA tax equity transaction costs disproportionately hurt distributed energy
“The way we incentivize electricity systems in the United States through the Inflation Reduction Act is through tax credits, right? And just fundamentally, the transaction costs associated with monetizing tax equity disproportionately hurt smaller distributed e…”
Norris: Cluster studies lack proof of speeding up grid interconnection queues
“What I think is fair to say is that we don't really have good empirical evidence, ah, to prove or disprove this hypothesis yet. There have been, ah, transmission providers that have shifted to cluster studies in recent years. I was very involved in one of thos…”
Norris: ERCOT's planning process pursues fewer proactive grid upgrades than needed
“It's worth noting that there are some really significant limitations to ERCOT's transmission planning process, and there are a lot of concerns that it doesn't Incorporate the longer-term benefits of these upgrades, and the result is that they aren't, they prob…”
Kann: Meeting power demand is US climate progress's biggest near-term roadblock
“It is, in my humble opinion, the single biggest near-term roadblock to significant climate progress, at least in the U.S.”
Vijendran: Space solar is the only promising clean energy receiving almost no investment
“Peculiarly, space-based solar power is the, Only really promising form of clean energy, potential form of clean energy technology that I would argue the world is not investing in significantly because every other energy source that you can think of, whether it…”
Rayford Smith: Utilities should target one-month grid interconnections, not 18 months
“I've heard people say there's no way to get things on the grid faster than that, 12 to 18 months. I think fundamentally like that, then we still have a problem. Like we should be shooting for three months. We should be shooting for one month.”
Emily Grubert: Fossil CCS primarily functions to extend fossil fuel lifespans
“In practice, because this is mostly fossil stuff, I think that ends up looking a lot like lifespan extension or some way to keep using fossil fuels into a decarbonized future.”
Hawkins: Climate efforts should preserve fungal habitats rather than engineer fungi
“I don't think it's so much about it being some kind of carbon reduction system that we can manipulate so much as it's about our behavior change so that we provide conditions that encourage the growth of these mycorrhizal fungi so they can continue to draw down…”
Zindler: First Solar is very well positioned for IRA manufacturing credits
“First Solar, obviously, as a U.S.-based company, is the one that Sort of licking its lips here, looking at these benefits because they are integrated. You know, they obviously have overseas production too, but they've got a lot, you know, a lot on U.S. Soil, y…”
Kann is skeptical LLMs will fundamentally change climate tech and energy
“I have generally been a bit more skeptical than most, I think, that it would change, fundamentally change at least, the things that I spend my professional time on, which is to say climate tech and energy.”
Madaeni: AI will shift software engineering toward prompting, code review, and QA
“At the end of the day, we're flying a plane that's, we're souping up the autopilot system, but I think we still need pilots. And, you know, a pilot with an autopilot system is a different kind of a pilot. So it's mostly about, I wouldn't say essay writing, but…”
Madaeni: LLMs are not equipped to build and train neural nets for forecasting
“But it's clear that I don't think that LLMs are equipped with, you know, building a whole neural net from scratch and training them and do some form of supervised, unsupervised learning for Forecasting.”
Madaeni: Equivalent battery optimization code manually takes two engineers one month
“Once you want to like grab, put some software foundation, what Duncan has presented today, I would say you need two engineers, more like a backend software engineer and an optimization engineer. And depending on how well they get along with each other, because…”
Kann: Voluntary carbon market's core trust issues remain unchanged today
“But I would argue that the fundamental problems that plagued the market when I was a wee young analyst are basically unchanged today. We still have not yet figured out how to build enough trust in this market to see its scale.”
Lubershane: Economically viable CCS will compete directly with grid energy storage
“To the extent CCS becomes, you know, proven and economically viable, I think it serves as a competitive force on, you know, any of these opportunities for grid storage and for energy storage over time, because it, you It's probably the next best alternative.”
Larson: EPA power plant rule poses very low risk to grid reliability
“Just the fact that peakers and you know, load following combined cycle units aren't touched at all says to me that that, that should be a very, very low concern, right, from a reliability perspective, because you've, all the stuff you're using to balance on th…”
Larson: Inflation Reduction Act tax credits are politically durable
“Like, you know, those rules are in place, those reg sorry, incentives are in there for 10 years, and although Congress has tried to repeal them, they're pretty, you know, politically durable.”
Hertz-Shargel: Flared-gas Bitcoin mining appears to offer a net emissions benefit
“My understanding is that flaring is very kind of deeply imperfect in that you do a lot of methane leakage or more than you'd want, and that if you are properly capturing this flared gas, this gas, and you can run it through, you know, a sort of a gen set to, a…”
Song: Inhaling sulfur dioxide is less painful than a bong hit
“Like, if you've ever done a massive bong hit, like, it's, let's, it's not, it sounds, a bong hit is worse than, you know, what you're gonna inhale in terms of the pain.”
Kugelmass: Most modern small modular reactors are neither small nor truly modular
“Most of them that are thought of as the SMRs in this generation are neither small, some of them are bigger than the original reactors, and they're not modular. Like, they are using traditional construction techniques that maybe have, like, a little bitty bit o…”
Kann: Commodity chemical decarbonization may favor electrochemistry over synbio
“So we're talking about stuff like ethylene and propanol, a bunch of these big commodity chemical categories, which are much bigger markets, bigger decarbonization impact ultimately, but less complex molecules to create and processes where sort of traditional c…”
Kann: Backlash against unfettered solar geoengineering is probably the right move
“I think a swift regulatory or political backlash to, like, totally unfettered solar geoengineering is probably the right thing.”
Kann: Thermostat grid value cannot support multiple layers of intermediaries
“The amount of economic value you can extract from a thermostat in response to grid signals is not nothing, but it's not enough to allow for, you know, three different intermediaries to take a slice of the pie.”
Composting is poorly suited for food waste due to its gloopy texture
“Composting is really good for, like, things like yard waste or agricultural waste, things that are really bulky. Composting is really not great for food waste. Food waste is kind of gloopy. You know, that's a technical term. And large-scale composters actually…”