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
Mills: Early US transformer shortage was driven by utility panic-buying
“But this wasn't, this was not the microchip problem, right? That was preventing automobiles from being produced, where, where literally you couldn't get the Componentry, the necessary input to produce the output. This was the toilet paper example, right? Where…”
Mills: DOE will compromise on proposed transformer efficiency standard
“They asked for public, the Department of Energy asked for public comment, and I think there was enough out there and enough concern expressed that I suspect a compromise position is going to come out. I don't think what they had originally released will actual…”
Bullard: Battery chemistries will segment by use case rather than one dominating
“In batteries, I think we will see a world where you've got some separation based on use cases. You know, there will be the NMC batteries that get used for hypercars and for aviation. And maybe the LFP battery becomes much more common for your sort of bulge bra…”
Cantor: Big Three lack even a quarter of Tesla's EV scale competency
“None of them has really pulled into the same kind of space, or even half or a quarter of the space that Tesla occupies in terms of competency on their kind of scale up of EVs.”
Cantor: BYD surpassed Tesla in quarterly EV sales in Q4 2023
“BYD hit all their targets last year in terms of sales, and they've surpassed Tesla in terms of fully electric vehicles on a quarterly basis in Q four.”
Cantor: Hertz EV sell-off was driven by Tesla price cuts hurting resale value
“That being said, a lot of this was a residual value story, and the fact that Musk was reducing, Musk and Tesla was reducing the cost of EVs to be better for consumers is a good thing for them, but for Hertz and some of these kind of fleet customers, if someone…”
Cantor: Only 4% of the $5B federal NEVI EV charging funds have been awarded
“And if you look at the infrastructure law with the five billion dollars as a part of the NEVI program, according to our charging infrastructure team, only four percent of those funds have been awarded to charging infrastructure operators.”
Cabiyo: Global biomass demand in 2050 exceeds sustainable supply by 11x
“There's a huge mismatch between the supply and demand there of biomass and biomass uses and that mismatch is, based on the best estimates that, that I've seen, that mismatch is something on the order of, like, 11 to 16 X. In other words, 11 to 16 X more uses i…”
Cabiyo: True "waste wood" does not exist due to competing commercial demands
“Waste wood is not really, especially if we think about that twenty-fifty scenario, waste wood is not really a thing. There's always going to be a use for waste wood.”
Cabiyo: High-quality wood pellets require whole logs, not just waste residues
“You can't make good pellets out of treetops and branches and sawmill residues. You need whole logs to do that well.”
Cabiyo: Biomass CDR developers ignoring counterfactual baselines are fooling themselves
“I think that if you're working on biomass CDR, and you're not thinking about counterfactuals every day, you're probably fooling yourself, or you have a really easy case that's going to get harder in the next couple decades.”
Zou: Climate tech success is graduating to project finance, not mega-rounds
“Specific to climate tech, it might not make sense to define success as an absolute dollar in venture investment, because at the end of the day, when we think about all this hardware and, you know, hard tech that needs to develop into projects, you want these c…”
Orbuch: High-quality carbon removal offtakes rival legacy voluntary market size
“Most of the dollars that have gone into the sort of market for higher quality removals are forward offtakes, right? Shayle Kann: Right. Shayle Kann: I guess that's true. Ryan Orbuch: So the cash is spent when the removal is delivered. And like, if you add up a…”
Orbuch: Buyers cannot purchase real carbon removal for $10 per ton
“Turns out you can't spend 10 dollars a ton and do anything real.”
Orbuch: Carbon credit registries face structural conflicts when paid by suppliers
“The methodology creation itself is often conflicted, where the supplier is paying the registry to create a methodology for them, which has some obvious issues. Or they're using some other one that some other supplier created.”
Orbuch: Legacy carbon markets lied to buyers about scientific uncertainty
“Buyers have been Implicitly comfortable with uncertainty for decades because we'd lied to them that the uncertainty didn't exist.”
Jaramillo: Displacing lithium-ion for intraday storage up to 12 hours is unlikely
“Displacing lithium ion is going to be really hard. I mean, the grid markets are sort of the tail on the dog of the automotive markets right now driving the production of lithium ion at scale. And so, so the industry that we're in, the electric industry gets to…”
Jaramillo: Grid storage value drops between 12 and 75 hours of duration
“What we find in the modeling is that there's a lot of value for sort of up to 10 or 12 hours, let's say. There is less value. I'm not going to put a specific number, but there's, there is less value that we see very markedly in the system until you get back up…”
Jaramillo: Grids will pay for 100-hour storage at $20 per kWh
“All the modeling that we did confirmed by third priority modeling is that a hundred hours and 20 dollars per kilowatt hour is sort of the magic combination. And if you can hit 20 dollars per kilowatt hour, the system will pay for a hundred hours of duration.”
Jaramillo: Multi-day storage halves the land footprint needed for solar buildout
“By having cost-effective multi-day storage, you can incorporate More renewable energy without sacrificing reliability at basically half, half the land cost, and that, by that I mean you only have to put solar on half as many acres to get the same benefit and t…”
US domestic battery manufacturing will reach 200 GWh by 2025
“And at that point, we're going to have the LG GM Ultium joint venture making over a hundred gigawatt hours of batteries throughout this country. LG Stellantis will be making 35 gigawatt hours. Stellantis Samsung STI will be making another 30. And then Ford wil…”
Lovering: Lack of demand-pull policy drove high US nuclear costs
“What's really been missing with nuclear in terms of policy to help bring down the cost is that demand pull policy. And so this is why you see that nuclear is cheaper and gets cheaper over time in places that have a lot of growth in demand for electricity becau…”
Lovering: Handful of advanced nuclear projects will come online before 2030
“I think we'll probably see ground start to get broken in maybe the next five years, and probably, I would say, a handful of projects coming online before 2030.”
Kann: Mineral shortages could cause 5-to-10-year stalls in EV adoption
“It's that we'll have like periods of more like five years or 10 years where we do have a shortage and the shortage doesn't translate to we can't sell any more electric vehicles. To higher costs for electric vehicles. And that translates to lower demand. And th…”
Hade: A catastrophic power grid failure will occur in the United States
“A catastrophic grid failure is going to happen, and when that catastrophic grid failure happens, the question's going to be, why didn't we think about resilience more?”
Hade: California is building basically no solar-only projects right now
“There are basically no solar-only projects being built in California right now.”
Hade: Clean long-duration storage is not remotely economically viable today
“So we're looking into things like, you know, iron air batteries, and nickel hydrogen batteries, and you know, hydrogen as a consumable fuel, right? But nothing even, like, comes remotely close to being economically viable right now for us, right? And so maybe …”
Houser: IRA incentives are insufficient for wind deployment without permitting reform
“Necessary, but not sufficient. It helps get the generation economics right, but unless permitting reform and interest rate declines materialize, it's unlikely that it'll be sufficient to drive the amount of wind deployment growth that we need.”
Software-style version iterations fail in food because poor first impressions are permanent.
“But with, you know, Beyond Meat, for example, launching Beyond Burger version, two point oh, three point oh, four point oh it's not an iPhone. You know, this is not a situation where you hook somebody on basic functionality, and they stick with you one, two, t…”
Nearly 60% of plant-based meat buyers are not substituting it for beef.
“What we hear from consumers is that about almost 60% of consumers who are buying plant-based meat are not substituting for beef. It's for a food other than beef, whether it's poultry, pork, seafood, eggs, non-meat, you know, pasta, pizza.”
Norris: Proactive transmission planning matters even more than interconnection queue reform
“The biggest Additional piece is improving the proactive transmission planning process and not relying as much on the interconnection process.”
Visioni: IMO 2020 sulfur cuts added roughly 0.05°C of global warming
“There's a few course estimates that, just based on Earth's sensitivity, say, suggested, says probably Alf, a 10th of a degree overall of increased warming.”
Visioni: Halting all human emissions immediately would cause near-term global warming
“We know that if today, if tomorrow morning there were no more anthropogenic emission of anything at all in the world, The main impact that we would see in the first decade, it would be a warming, because this aerosol effect that is masking part of the warming …”
Visioni: Unintended shipping aerosol drop reveals safe threshold for geoengineering experiments
“This example of the shipping regulation should really be Can really tell us a lot about this, right? So, because we're, we are claiming that this effect is maybe there, but it's small, and a lot of climate scientists are sort of saying already, in a way, befor…”
Webber: Solar panels are significantly more land-efficient than corn ethanol
“If you have an acre or whatever amount of land you have and is hit with photons, you can convert those photons into a useful form of energy, say electricity, with something like 20% efficiency. But if you convert it first into bioenergy, Corn for ethanol, then…”
Yeagerson: EV grid value derives from power capacity, not deep cycling
“The value of these batteries is going to be more in the power than in the energy, and it's going to be more in the capacity than in the KWH, right? So you're gonna have, the value is that these things are gonna be available and, you know, maybe sometimes used …”
Yeagerson: Aggregated EV fleets will become highly dispatchable grid capacity resources
“If you have a million thermostats and you've done it 20 times, then actually it's more dispatchable than a discrete peaking resource. And I think you're gonna find that with vehicles as well. It's gonna be very fungible, it's gonna be very predictable, we're g…”
Lubbershane: Renewables and Storage Cannot Provide Multi-GW Firm Power by 2026
“If you need new gigawatts of firm, twenty-four-seven power, like, in the next three years, there's nothing that can really supply that from renewables and storage.”
Vijendran: Central space solar beam will likely reach 200 watts per square meter
“Part of the beam, especially the central part of the beam, will likely be exceeding safety limits up to perhaps a couple of hundred watts per square meter.”
Vijendran: Full space solar system costs fell from $100B to $1B–$10B
“What was a hundred billion before, now you're looking at one to ten billion for a full system, depending on, on the scale you're looking at.”
Vijendran: Space solar beats fusion with instant zero-loss global power transmission
“Space-based solar power has all of the benefits of fusion, and some, because it can move power from one place to another place that is underneath the satellite essentially instantly over vast geographic regions without any loss, and even, you know, nuclear fus…”
Grogan: First commercial seabed mineral recovery will occur around 2028
“I think probably around twenty-twenty-eight is, is a fair guess.”
Emily Grubert: Cement may be the only sector where CCS is indispensable
“I think with regard to this category of CCS, I sometimes can convince myself that cement might be the only thing in this category where you need CCS to mitigate emissions from something.”
Emily Grubert: Carbon removal is a depletable resource due to physical constraints
“With CDR in particular, I think we would do well to really recognize this as essentially a depletable resource in some ways. You know, there's an amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere that means we're not going to run out anytime, you know, in the foreseeable future…”
Emily Grubert: Siting pipelines near fossil plants risks misallocating future DAC infrastructure
“The idea of maximizing now because you're going to need the infrastructure anyway fails, I think, in one major way, which is that it's not conscious of where that infrastructure needs to go. And in a situation where you're designing linear infrastructure like …”
Emily Grubert: Synthetic fuel accounting lacks structures to prevent double counting credits
“We don't really have the structures in place to ensure that that
Accounting is really happening, and looking at some of the project announcements or ideas that I've seen where both ends of the spectrum are kind of claiming the mitigation is challenging, especi…”
Emily Grubert: Climate policy should minimize overall carbon capture and storage deployment
“So in my view, I think we need to at least try to get to a world that minimizes the amount of CCS that we're doing, whether that is for mitigation or removal, and basically just because it's infrastructurally intensive, it's energy intensive, all of these kind…”
Corbeau: Hydrogen Is a Conversion Business, Not a Rent Business Like Oil
“From an economic point of view, many developing countries want to benefit the maximum from hydrogen, and hydrogen is not a rent business. It's not like oil or gas. It's a conversion industry, so you are never going to get as much revenues and benefits as you w…”