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 2,090 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 24 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
Brown: Nearly 75% of new Nest thermostat owners opt into energy shifting
“And so we have actually seen both opt-in and engagement that we're getting nearly 75% of all new Nest thermostat customers that install a device are opting into energy shifting.”
Chaset: Very Few Residential Solar Buyers Are Motivated Primarily by Going Green
“The number of consumers we would engage with who are really focused first and foremost on why I want to be green was actually pretty low. That's a side benefit. And, you know, they want to talk about it, but really they're talking about as long as it does this…”
Schroepfer: Geoengineering to lock current temperatures costs ~$10B annually
“About ten billion a year to, like, lock in current, current temperatures.”
Gariman: China produces 99% of heavy rare earth elements
“99% of heavy rare earth elements, more specifically terbium and dysprosium, comes from China, within China, and goes into magnets. So those are not available in mines outside China.”
Gariman: The Chinese government artificially controls rare earth market prices
“And the market price for rare earth elements often is artificially controlled by Chinese government.”
Gariman: No heavy rare earth deposits in Brazil or elsewhere are mined today
“Some of the deposits in, let's say, Brazil and other countries do carry a good amount of heavy rare earth elements, but none of those deposits are being mined today.”
Gariman: Chinese exports of rare earth magnets and metals face active disruptions
“So today the shipment of the magnets is really disrupted. It's not being shipped today. Magnets, oxides, metals, alloys, all of them, all the above are delayed in shipments.”
Waters: Natural gas turbines ordered today have lead times until 2030
“You know, turbines today for natural gas, you know, if you place an order today, it's, you're not going to see that until, let's say, twenty-thirty.”
Friedmann: Retrofitting depreciated gas plants with CCS costs $40–$70/MWh
“I will add, if you retrofit an existing plant, it's cheaper, because assuming that plant has been fully depreciated, so you're retrofitting something that's in a utility off on the grid somewhere, the costs come in more like 40 to 70 dollars a megawatt hour.”
Friedmann: Section 45Q cuts gas CCS adder in half to $10–$15/MWh
“And that means you're looking at something like 20 to 25 to 30 dollars a megawatt hour is the adder in most markets. And 45 Q knocks off, say, half of that.”
Friedmann: Fluor, SLB, Shell, and Mitsubishi offer fully commercial 10Mt carbon capture
“There's a handful of companies that will today sell you a big facility with a performance guarantee and a wrapper, and they will sell you like up to ten million tons of capture a year. They will sell you big facilities. These are Fleur, Schlumberger Acker, She…”
Boomhauer: Proprietary insurer catastrophe models are impossible for objective third-party evaluation.
“Almost all of the models that are applied by insurers today are developed by for-profit private companies. It makes them all a little bit of a black box. It makes them all basically impossible for objective third parties to evaluate”
Stadler: Modeling shows data centers can operate 100% grid-independent
“And the analysis is that we did for these two cases actually suggested you can run 100% grid independent, right? And then it just becomes a redundancy challenge for the generators.”
Norris: Roughly half of all US generation and transmission is unused
“And so what that basically means is that in any given hour,
On average, approximately half of all generation and transmission infrastructure is unused on average in the U.S., and it's actually worse than that because you're not counting for all the reserve ma…”
Norris: Data center curtailment requires only partial load reduction in most hours
“When we ran the numbers, so like at that, that 0.25% load curtailment rate on average, we found that the number of hours in which Curtailment would be required. Some amount of curtailment would be 85 hours, but in 73 of those 85 hours, at least 50% of the new …”
Norris: Data centers are not constant 24/7 flat electrical loads
“I don't know where this idea came from of 24 seven. They are not 24 seven loads, and it's critical to clarify this. So the servers may be 24 seven, right, the chips themselves, but there's an enormous amount of cooling infrastructure and other infrastructure a…”
Norris: Duke Energy mandates demand response for new 100-megawatt loads
“Duke Energy said at a public event that they are now going to require all new hyperscale loads above a hundred megawatts that participate in demand response.”
Johnson: 90% of tax credit projects sit in Republican-held congressional districts
“People are looking at 90% of projects with, that are benefiting from the credits being in districts that are represented by Republicans.”
Koomey: Data center compute grew 6x while power rose only 6% (2010-2018)
“We had about a six-fold increase in the compute output for data centers from 20 10 to 20 18, but electricity use went up a grand total of six percent over that period.”
Koomey: IEA hides data and calculations for its power forecasts
“Whereas some of the other projections, even From pretty credible organizations like the International Energy Agency, you can't actually figure out what they did. They don't release the data. They don't release the calculations in any explicit way.”
Koomey: US data center power share rose to 4.4% in 2023
“The U the U S number from the report to Congress that just came out from LBL was something like on the order of two percent of the electricity in 20, 20, 20, 21 was data centers. And now in 20, 23, now, 2023, which is the last historical year we have, it's 4.4…”
Yao: LFP battery cell prices have fallen below $50 per kWh
“So, so current prices for LFP are basically at, I think it was reported to be about 56 dollars per kilowatt hour in the middle of last year. I think that number is down to maybe forty-something, sub-fifty now.”
Yao: Lithium-ion battery material costs could hit a $35/kWh floor
“If I model out the price floor, basically, Bill of materials only. Take out manufacturing costs. I can see a world in which we get to 35, I can see a world in which we can be at 35 today. 35 dollars per kilowatt hour.”
Yao: Sodium-ion battery cell costs remain above $80 per kWh
“For sodium ion, it's still my understanding to be above 80 dollars per kilowatt hour for the NFM type chemistries, the layered oxide chemistries, and because of the further energy density penalty that you have with Some of the pyrophosphate materials my unders…”
Kimber: Co-located renewables can power Texas data centers carbon-free 75%–80% of the year
“75 to 80% of the hours of the year, we can run fully carbon free with, you know, wind, solar, and batteries all on the same site. And then, you know, 20%, maybe a little over 20% of the time, we need to have some gas or we need to use the grid.”
Bullard: US energy storage investment now surpasses wind investment
“Solar is just on its way up. You know, it's more than forty billion dollars in the trail in 12 months. And storage now invests more than wind does in the States.”
Bullard: DeepSeek was funded with $5.5M from a Chinese hedge fund
“DeepSeek is an open source, small model. It was funded with 5.5 million dollars from a Chinese hedge fund.”
Bullard: DeepSeek V3 matched Meta Llama 3.1 using under 2.8M GPU hours
“And the sort of benchmark to compare it to would be the Lama 3.1 model from meta, which had four and five billion parameters and just under thirty one million training hours. And deep seek is getting similar results of V three with six hundred and seventy one …”
Bullard: Data centers consumed nearly 26% of Virginia's power in 2023
“Virginia is, you know, 30, just under 34 terawatt hours of power consumed by data centers in 2020 three, and almost 26% of state power already going to that.”
Bullard: Rappahannock received single interconnection requests 4x its peak load
“Rappahannock had this filing in, in Virginia, where they basically are saying, look, like, we are now getting requests for interconnection. That in a single location are bigger than our entire peak load right now. We have a peak load of 1.2 gigawatts. We have …”
Bullard: Energy accounts for only 1.7% to 6.3% of AI training costs
“The energy component of that comes way after the AI accelerator chips, the other server components, the interconnection costs, and it's somewhere between 1.7 and 6.3% of the cost of training and experimentation.”
Low-Income Customers Often Benefit From TOU Rates Without Changing Usage Habits
“We've seen differences in some places. We've seen actually that on the whole low income customers do better without making any changes to their usage with through a time of use rate. And in others, we've seen that not be the case.”
Bullard: Historical aerosol emissions have masked 0.57°C of global warming
“And then the aerosols that we've been pumping into the atmosphere for a 175 years, reduce the warming effect by .57 degrees C, which is obviously massive, like an obviously massive, significant thing.”
Bullard: Larry Fink's letters dropped climate mentions from 45 to five
“I would just go through there and count up how many times did he talk about sustainability and climate, and in twenty-twenty, it was, you know, a combined, like, 45 times almost. In twenty-twenty-one, he mentioned not only sustainability and climate, but he me…”
Grunwald: Sri Lanka's Agrochemical Ban Immediately Crashed Crop Yields
“Well, we saw what happened in Sri Lanka, where they banned them, and immediately farm yields crashed. Sri Lanka could no longer feed itself. And essentially started outsourcing not only its food production, but the pollution and emissions from that production.”
Grunwald: Cultivated meat costs fell at least 99.9% over past decade
“They've reduced the costs, like, I guess I would say certainly at least 99.9% in the last decade. Probably closer to 99.99%.”
Fernandez: Post-COVID, large EPC contractors no longer offer lump-sum turnkey contracts
“The reality is the EPC CapEx world changed dramatically after, after COVID, right? Things that used to be very secured, large scale EPC companies that used to be able to give you a, you know, lump sum turnkey contract are just not doing that anymore in, in con…”
Fernandez: FOAK climate projects cannot access traditional project-level debt
“As far as debt goes, we haven't seen it. We've seen people be able to raise debt at the corporate level via, via venture debt or via corporate debt. Now, those are very low leverage numbers, right? They're not the 80, 95% that, you know, you will get in solar.”
Scheyder: Western Lithium Miners Curtail Expansions as Chinese Competitors Overproduce
“We definitely see, given the current pricing dynamics that many Western lithium companies are having to curtail their expansion plans because Chinese linked rivals are increasing production or not curtailing their own production, i.e. They're operating at a lo…”
Klauber: RMI RFP allows two-thirds of green steel procurement via book-and-claim
“They have got the Steel Buyers platform and there's an RFP. It's actually live right now. And in a month or so the proposals will be due, and that's to buy over a million tons of steel per annum equivalent of green steel and two-thirds of that actually can be …”
Khan: BMW canceled a $2 billion Northvolt order over quality issues
“What seemed to, you know, make the slope of the downturn for the company accelerate a lot was BMW canceling this big two billion dollar order because of quality issues as far as I understand it.”
Jaffe: Few non-Chinese companies provide end-to-end equipment across 18 battery stages
“There's essentially 18 stages that you're each with its own different types of equipment. And there's very few companies that make every one of those pieces of equipment. And especially there's very few Chinese, non-Chinese companies that, that have That, that…”
Janous: Full-stack data center CapEx, including GPUs, costs $25M per megawatt.
“The cost of a data center today in terms of the full stack CapEx deployment all the way through GPUs is about 25 twenty-five million a megawatt or twenty-five billion a gigawatt”
Frader-Thompson: Tens of thousands of events prove VPPs are 99.9% reliable
“Like, I can show you data from literally tens of thousands of events showing that this thing is 99.9 plus percent reliable.”
Thiel: Even at $1/kg hydrogen, synthetic methane feedstock costs $10/MMBtu
“In the best case, you need something like half a kilo of hydrogen per kilo of methane. And so if we looked into a, to a wonderful version of the future where we, Get to the kind of magic one dollar per kilogram hydrogen mark that, you know, is, is on the DOE's…”
Lambert: Heat pump hardware is only about 20% of installation cost
“The relative cost of the heat pump itself is Is, it's small. It's probably 20% or so of the overall cost.”
Lambert: Quilt buys line hide for $1/ft versus US distributors' $25/ft
“The typical distributors today, if you go at, kind of, if you're a contractor and you're gonna go buy it from one of the big distributors, you're paying about 25 dollars a foot for that line hide. We've been able to source it from China for less than a dollar …”