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
Belady: AI's biggest benefit is hardware engineering efficiency, not consumer chatbots
“The reality is the real benefit is engineering the products that we have to drive efficiency. And I see. I see that happening relatively slowly.”
Loo: Projections show ammonia will eventually be cheaper than e-methanol
“In the long term, if you look at the projections and the numbers, I think if costs were the driver, then the cost of ammonia is going to be cheaper than the cost of e-methanol.”
Loo: Low-density future fuels will force distributed bunkering networks
“And so that model, I think, will break down and we will see more distributed bunkering because of the low volumetric density of these future fuels.”
Loo: Customers show zero willingness to pay shipping's green fuel premium
“There's no willingness to pay for the green premium.”
BYD's new hybrid technology delivers 2,100 kilometer range for under $15,000
“What they call the DM-F.O technology, which is an interesting technology in that it increased the fuel efficiency to around, like, 80 to 90 miles per gallon. And they made a lot of waves with this 2100 kilometer range claim, which has been verified by, you kno…”
Huang: Germany and Japan lack software talent for competitive EVs
“Part of the mistake they made is they never had like a really competitive software industry. So when we have this shift going from a mechanical gas car to something that's more electrical and software driven to something that have AI in the future, they don't …”
Janus: AEP will not connect 90 gigawatts in next decade
“There's no reason to believe that AEP is going to connect 90 gigawatts in the next 10 years.”
Janus: AI Training Loads Will Not Run as Intermittent Renewable-Following Workloads
“So I think it's a little bit overblown to say, and I think this is also true of Something like the conversation around crypto, but that these are highly curtailable loads that you could just, you know, attach a training model to a wind farm and only run it, yo…”
Janus: Powering Gigawatt-Scale Data Centers with Solar and Storage Is Not Feasible
“You're not going to put solar in storage to supply a 500 to gigawatt, 500 megawatt to gigawatt scale data center. I mean, it's just not feasible.”
Janus: Nuclear Power Will Not Solve Data Center Bottlenecks This Decade
“The focus that these companies have right now is getting data centers online in the next, Two, three, four years, and nuclear is not going to solve that problem.”
Janus: Hyperscaler climate targets are probably not achievable on time
“And so there is, I think at this point, a point of coming to grips with the fact that those targets are probably not achievable in the time horizons that they had all set.”
Janus: Hyperscalers have deprioritized day-one clean power for immediate grid capacity
“You know, if you go back a few years, you know, zero carbon energy day one was really becoming a non-negotiable that, you know, we wanted energy, wanted to be zero carbon. We wanted to have it Done, ready to go when we plug in the data center. I think the, pro…”
Janus: Chip efficiency gains will not reduce AI data center power demand
“If let's say Meta, for instance, finds a piece of land or a point on the grid where they can pull three gigawatts, Of power on one location. And then the next day, NVIDIA comes out with a chip that's twice as efficient. Is Meta going to build a 1.5 gigawatt da…”
Baglino: Tesla excluded nuclear and geothermal from Master Plan due to costs
“It was a little bit of a complexity, and also the, if you took the best known cost of all those technologies and just stuck them into the optimizer wouldn't pick them, is, is really what it comes down to.”
Baglino: AI power demand is overhyped by a 'toilet paper' queue run
“I'm not so sure that it is going to be as dramatic as people think, both because I think
there's a little bit of the toilet paper problem going on here... You've got all of these companies that think AI is going to be massive and want AI to be massive, and th…”
Baglino: Motor design engineering makes magnet materials highly substitutable
“Magnet materials, for example, are incredibly substitutable. And if you think of the design space as not just the magnet, but the magnet plus the, you know, electromagnetic system it's inside of with the steel And the geometry of the rotor and the stator and t…”
Baglino: China's lithium refining dominance is driven by CAPEX, not tech or labor
“It's not like the refineries are in China because the technology to refine lithium is in China. Like, that's definitely not the case at all. It's purely been, like, the capital investment to build the refinery is the lowest in China. And it's not labor either,…”
Baglino: Over 90% of Battery Precursor Plants Discharge Sulfates Into Waterways
“All the precursor, almost, I want to say all, over 90% of the precursor in the world is for battery cathodes is produced in facilities where the wastewater, the, like, sulfates and that are in the wastewater of that process kind of can just go directly into th…”
Baglino: Global clean grid requires 1.5 TW annual renewable deployment
“1.5 terawatts is the total amount of renewable energy capacity that will need to be deployed on an annual basis to maintain the sustainable energy economy. And that's basically keeping up with plant retirements. So on a steady state basis, 1.5 terawatts is how…”
Lubbershane: 3x battery density improvement won't make electric aviation viable
“And so I think most people who've taken a serious look at aviation and even considering major step changes in battery density, let's say a three times improvement in density, From where we are today, there's just a vanishingly small share of total flight miles…”
Lubbershane: Battery electrification is not practically feasible for maritime cargo ships
“You can only imagine what kind of additional electric infrastructure would be required to power, you know, large cargo ships at a port and not just providing shore power while they're parked, but actually giving them enough energy to make a journey across the …”
Lubbershane: Maxing out global cellulosic biomass solves only half of aviation demand
“Even kind of optimistically, if you were to max out that resource globally,
And all of it were to go into the aviation fuel market, especially given the growth we're expecting to see in demand for aviation fuel.
we're still talking about probably solving abou…”
Lubbershane: Expensive synthetic fuels make sense to preserve existing vehicle and hub infrastructure
“The more I think if you take decarbonization really seriously, then most likely that is the biggest constraint, upgrading those really expensive heavy duty vehicles, long lived vehicles and long lived hub infrastructure. And probably it does make sense to find…”
Shah: Net metering's value declines past 5% solar penetration
“I think we've always known that net metering has declining value beyond sort of five percent penetration, and, but when you get to five percent penetration, the solar industry has so much political power that they're able to keep things going.”
Shah: California's NEM 3.0 lacks a transparent battery compensation mechanism
“They did the NEMM three point O piece, but there's no transparent way of getting paid for your battery piece.”
Shah: Residential solar loan securitization model has a short shelf life
“The game of just putting dumb solar in people's houses, you know, providing them a loan, right? Making money on that loan, right? And it's a securitization story, right? So you get debt from Wall Street, and then you own the equity slice, and then you try real…”
Shah: Warehouse rooftop solar may be cheaper net-net than utility-scale solar
“And so, and when you look at, you know, interconnection cues from utility-scale solar and that kind of stuff, it may actually end up being net-net cheaper to put solar on these four-acre warehouse rooftops than to put it in the middle of a field.”
Shah: Zero-backfeed VPPs bypass utility permission hurdles by only offsetting load
“And so if you make a simplifying assumption, which is that no one is backfeeding anything into the grid. Right? Right? That the batteries you know, basically use case here is to make your home go off grid. Right? Sort of an energy efficiency play. So your home…”
Delta: European SAF mandate is ahead of supply and unfriendly to consumers
“Sometimes a mandate, and in this case, this is our position, that, you know, it's just a couple years ahead of where the supply is, and so it's forcing it into the market at a price point that is not We don't think it's consumer friendly.”
DeLuca: Models suggest power-to-liquid fuel costs could undercut conventional jet fuel
“There's a lot of models that suggest that power to liquid, the cost structure should be lower than conventional jet fuel and should sit and be very stable because you're truly using these unlimited resources.”
Friedmann: Announced SAF plants cannot meet the 2027 global airline mandate
“If every Sustainable aviation fuel plant that had been announced were to be built, there would not be enough fuel for the twenty-twenty-seven target. Period.”
Grabow: US-built container ships cost five times more than international builds
“By the 19 thirties, it was up to a 50% premium for U.S. Built ships. By the 19 fifties, a U.S. Built ship was double the cost of one built abroad. By the 19 nineties, it was triple the cost of one built abroad, and today, a U.S. Built container ship is somewhe…”
Grabow: Foreign shipyard workers earn more than Americans despite building cheaper ships
“Well, the data suggests, actually, that workers in South Korea and Japan and Europe, they make more than Americans, and yet the ships are still significantly cheaper, so that's interesting.”
Grabow: Zero Jones Act-Compliant LNG Tankers Exist in the United States
“We can't transport it by water to other parts of the United States because there are no LNG tankers that comply with the Jones Act.”
Moerenhout: Zero Chance Energy Transition Succeeds on Schedule Without China
“Zero chance. Not at all. Not in a million years.”
Bordoff: Critical mineral supply shocks do not disrupt daily energy use like oil
“So critical minerals are an input to a manufactured good that can produce energy or store energy. It is not energy. We don't burn critical minerals for energy, and so if we had a disruption in some types of critical minerals, you might see delays and much high…”
Steingart: Redwood, Ascend, and Li-Cycle rely on scrap exceeding 20%
“Currently, all three of these companies are living off of gigafactory scrap, which is exceptionally high, over, over 20%, as I understand it.”
Steingart: Battery recyclers will face a lean period as scrap rates drop
“I worry about the business case here because the gigafactories have every incentive in the world to minimize this amount of scrap, and so at the same time, we don't want batteries to die, so every recycler is going to have a lean period as scrap rates go down.…”
Steingart: Direct recycling is likely the only viable path for LFP batteries
“I think if LFP recycling is going to have a shot, it's going to be on a direct recycling route, and for those that know me and get a beer with me after conferences, they're probably doing a spit take, because I'm pretty skeptical of direct recycling in a lot o…”
Lubbershane: Utilities are postponing coal plant retirements due to load growth
“The first thing that utilities are planning to build to manage their entry into the gauntlet is they're planning to not retire their coal power plants on previously agreed upon or decided upon timelines.”
Lubbershane: Building new natural gas is the easiest near-term option for utilities
“So for any electric utility, for any load serving entity, grid operator who has to meet rising demand in the next, let's call it two to three years, even up to five years, the easiest, most straightforward thing to do at this point is to build new gas fire gen…”
Lubbershane: North America will significantly expand natural gas generation
“I don't see a way that we make it through this first phase of the gauntlet without adding a significant amount of more natural gas fire generation in North America.”
Lubbershane: Surging electricity demand makes a nuclear energy renaissance all but certain
“I think that the gauntlet makes it all but certain that that's one pathway we will turn towards.”
Kann: US is unlikely to build significant new nuclear capacity this decade
“It's unlikely we're going to see a lot of new nuclear capacity built in the United States this decade, and even the first few projects that are going to get built, those are going to be quite expensive.”
Groarke: AI is not creating a massive new utility market
“I can't say that there is an enormous new market emerging because of AI. As a result, I think AI is kind of riding the wave within the sector.”
Stacey Kauk predicts carbon removal takes 30 years to become a commodity
“In order to function properly, we need to end up in a place where a ton is a ton is a ton, and there's two reasons for that. One, it, Provides that level playing field on the side of the suppliers, but it also provides a level requirement across companies or w…”
Stacey Kauk says some carbon removal startups sell credits below cost
“One, they're gonna charge the cost. Their price is equal to the cost. And then there are other companies that their price Is less than the cost, and they're taking a loss because they want to come out, and they are having, they have a different business strate…”