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 115 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 10 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
Lubershain: Most utility service territories have no spare grid capacity left
“In most utility service territories, it's not the case that there's a lot of headroom left on the grid. There's no more headroom left in the grid. There's no more spare capacity in most places, which means that oftentimes you will have to build new power gener…”
Lubershain: EPRI found data centers already slightly lower average customer bills
“And when you do control for other variables that might bias the analysis Epri found that basically, on average, data centers are lowering customer bills a little bit already. So we are seeing, it's not a major impact, it's something like six percent, but data …”
Lubershain: Electricity rates will rise for most people in coming years
“Data centers are absolutely going to be pushing up rates, and other factors, right, in the supply chain. Rates are going up for most people in most places, I think, in the years to come.”
Lubershane: Retail electricity prices will outpace inflation, driving broader inflation
“I have a very high degree of confidence that moving forward, because as you said, all this stuff is, is leading indicators prices are going to rise faster than inflation overall, and because electricity is sort of a Foundational good for the economy. They'll a…”
Lubershane: Multi-year data center growth will force large-scale off-grid power adoption
“And if this data center boom continues for longer than the next three to five years, if it's really a robust trend that is gonna, you know, be, Decade plus, you know, for the foreseeable future, then I don't see any other option besides going to something like…”
Lubershain: The nuclear industry cannot sustain a Cambrian explosion of reactor designs
“There just can't be a Cambrian explosion of new reactors. The, Industrial logic of the nuclear industry just doesn't lend itself to that. I think best case scenario, it's bad for the industry if you end up with, you know, four or five competing reactor designs…”
Lubershain: Geothermal deployment will not truly take off until the 2030s
“I think that the inflection is, is going to be much slower and happen over the next five years, and that geothermal will really be positioned to take off more so in the 20 thirties than in the late 20 twenties.
That's my bet at the moment.”
Lubershain: Ford is moving ahead with $3B Michigan CATL-licensed plant
“Ford has basically said, we're moving ahead with this three billion dollar battery plant in Michigan, where they're licensing lithium iron phosphate technology from CATL, the Chinese battery giant.”
Lubershain: New nuclear power will not scale in US until 2035+
“I don't think we're gonna see, we might see a little bit, you know, in the 2030, early 20 thirties time frame, but I think for the most part we're talking 2035 and beyond when we, when we'd actually have new nuclear power at scale coming online.”
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: 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: 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.”
Lubershane: Decarbonized grid storage needs will fall closer to 47 days
“So, you know, between the minutes of energy storage we have today and 47 days, I think we're going to fall probably actually ultimately closer to the 47 days level, ah, than even minutes, hours, or just a few days worth of storage.”
Lubershane: Form Energy's 100-hour battery will cost under a tenth of lithium-ion
“Form is on track to achieve a total installed cost. We're not talking about the cost of the materials here, but a total installed cost for a approximately a hundred hour battery system, which is basically a four day battery system that is in the ballpark of a …”
Lubershain: Electrifying heat could triple cold-climate peak electricity demand
“And so what this might do in cold climate environments is, is Basically shift peak demand from the summer to the winter and increase the peak by about three X.”
Lubershane: Decarbonization will trigger intense competition for waste biomass
“You need new dedicated land growing crops for that biomass, and I, you know, jury's still out, right, but I'm skeptical we're going to see that happen, and what that means is actually you have a run not, not on new land, but probably a run on what's called, wh…”
Lubershain: Home Gas Appliances With Upstream Leaks Are Worse Than Coal
“If you are to burn natural gas in in an appliance in a home, for example, like a home boiler or in, in, in an oven And you take that two and a half percent leak rate upstream as a given, then it's actually even a little bit worse in the next 20 years from a gl…”
Lubershain: Grid equipment and gas plant costs have doubled or tripled
“Conductor is, like, twice as expensive. So, like, basic aluminum, steel-reinforced conductor. Transformers are two-plus times more expensive. Switchgear is two times more expensive. Gas power plants are two to three times more expensive.”
Lubershane: Grid equipment costs 2-3x more and takes 3-5 years to deliver
“Anything you want to order today is probably going to take three plus years in the case of gas turbines, probably more like five years to be able to get your hands on. Anything you order today, whether it's a turbine or a transformer or just the, you know, alu…”
Lubershane: 2025 EV power demand growth matched data center growth globally
“The IEA recently came out with some data recently on global electricity demand growth, and it turns out that last year in 2025 from about, from a global standpoint, there was almost exactly as much electricity demand growth around the world from electric vehic…”
Lubershane: A home humanoid robot will use 3-4x a refrigerator's annual power
“If you were to sort of extrapolate from the humanoids that are being built today and you were to run one for five or six hours a day doing various types of tasks around your home and your garden, sort of, you know, the theoretical robo-butler, that would consu…”
Lubershain: Every major utility could deploy hundreds of megawatts of DERs soon
“Could every utility, every major utility in the country within five years have a several hundred megawatt DER program, instead of it just being a few that have a several hundred megawatt DER program? And in a few places where, where you're, you know, have a li…”
Lubershain: Cost-effective battery systems will rely on Chinese cells for longer
“Not, not the cells, right? Those have gotten really cheap, but the full systems need to get cheaper if they're going to be really cost-effective resources. That probably means some portion of the battery, like the cells, at least for a while longer, is coming …”
Lubershain: Clean hydrogen producers' price sensitivity prevents US market turnaround
“Hydrogen, anyone making hydrogen is not going to be a price insensitive buyer. They're very price sensitive. They want the cheapest clean power. I don't know. I, I'm not personally super bullish on this making, helping make hydrogen make a turnaround”
Lubbershane: Battery cost will not constrain vehicle electrification, but density will
“Cost of batteries to some degree, although I think we have increasing confidence that cost of batteries is not going to be the constraint on basically electrifying any class of vehicle, but density of batteries definitely does matter.”
Lubbershane: First-gen biofuels offer only 25% to 40% carbon intensity advantage
“I mean, if you look at most studies, there is an advantage, you know, probably somewhere in the 25 to 40% carbon intensity benefit range relative to fossil fuel.”
Lubbershane: Data center developers cannot secure power despite high willingness to pay
“They're saying, like, we're desperate, we're willing to pay if you can deliver it to me next year, or in two years, and they're not even able to get it, in many cases, get power on those kind of timelines.”
Lubbershane: Surging demand and supply constraints will increase wholesale electricity prices
“Basic economics, right? We're seeing demand rise really quickly. We're seeing constraints on supply. All else equal, I think that means we're going to see increases in wholesale electricity prices in general. I think if you had to make a bet one way or the oth…”
Lubbershane: Hyperscalers will pay a premium for early-stage clean energy technologies
“I think we're gonna see that particularly when it comes to customers who are willing to pay a premium for You know, perhaps newer technology that is not yet come very far down the cost curve. And, you know, I, again, I think what we're gonna see it from compan…”
Dominion Energy cannot power new Northern Virginia data centers until 2026.
“So for example, it's been reported that the electric utility in Virginia, Dominion, has basically told data center developers that they don't have capacity. They can't serve additional data center demand in Northern Virginia, which is one of the biggest areas …”
Lubbershane: Amazon turns to Bloom Energy fuel cells for Oregon data centers
“Amazon announced that they've got these three new data centers in Oregon that they're going to be, at least for the short term, powering with fuel cells from Bloom Energy, natural gas powered fuel cells. And part of that is because they just can't get connecte…”
Lubbershane: U.S. battery factories in development will consume over 1% of national power
“We've added up Roughly speaking about a terawatt hour's worth of new battery manufacturing capacity that's really credible and under development in the U.S. Today. And by that, I mean a terawatt hour's worth of battery capacity of annual battery production... …”
Lubbershane: Most Future Green Hydrogen Production Will Likely Be Off-Grid
“Ultimately a lot of that hydrogen production is going to be probably off grid, you know, basically paired directly with large scale Renewables in the cheapest places where you can access renewable power.”
Lubbershane: Surging electricity costs could cause voters to abandon decarbonization
“If the power sector isn't able to make it through this period and it results in People unable to build new manufacturing facilities, new data centers in a timely fashion. And if it results in kind of costs starting to spiral out of control, electricity costs s…”
All 2021 US wind and solar equaled only 5 days of primary energy supply
“All of the wind and solar power generated in twenty-twenty-one, if you were to bottle all of that energy up and store it in sort of the same way that we store fossil fuels, it would be only about five days worth of energy supply.”
Thermal storage media can store heat at $5/kWh or lower
“The core energy storage components of these materials can be in the ballpark of five dollars per kilowatt hour or lower.”
Lubershain: Global AC demand will add another US power sector by 2050
“Depending on what forecast you look at in a sort of business as usual technology scenario, that means we're on track to add, roughly speaking, another whole U.S. Electricity sector worth of electricity demand globally for this new air conditioning demand by ar…”
Lubershain: Heat pump coefficient of performance drops to 1 at -5°F
“By the time you get to around, you know, negative five, -10 degrees, certainly anywhere below that, with almost any heat pump on the market A, that heat pump loses some of its Capacity. So you need a bigger heat pump that starts with higher capacity in order t…”
Lubershane: Net global agricultural land area has remained flat for 40 years
“We, we've increased total crop land by zero. Because we've grown so much more efficient. Yes. On net, the exact same amount of agricultural land, globally speaking, that we used when I was born.”
Lubershain: Solar makes clean electricity the world's cheapest non-firm power
“And, you know, in fact, the falling cost of solar has made electricity and clean electricity, you know, the cheapest levelized non-firm energy cost in the world”
Lubershain: Building heat will see the longest tail of natural gas use
“Where I'm pretty confident we'll, we'll see the longest tail of natural gas for the foreseeable future is in all of the end uses that are currently served by natural gas at the distribution level. So again, That's predominantly building heating. Interestingly …”
Lubershain: Large data centers add 10% to 30%+ to mid-sized utility loads
“For a mid-sized utility, most of the kind of, Hundreds of megawatt scale data centers we're seeing today would add 10%, 20%, 30%, or more if we're getting up to gigascale data centers to the utility's total load.”
Lubershain: Energy accounts for 5% to 10% of data center operational costs
“Energy is a pretty small share of the total cost of goods sold for that That data center, right? It's something like five to 10% of the total cost.”
Lubershane: Data center electricity demand boom will last 3 to 5 years
“That is, of course, driven by the just extraordinary boom in demand from data centers that is happening right now, and I'm pretty confident is going to continue to be happening for the next three to five years, and honestly, who knows after that”
Lubershane: EVs benefited from early solar investments in power electronics
“Electric vehicles have obviously had, had this tremendous impact on, on batteries, but electric vehicles themselves benefited from early investments from the solar industry in, ah, power electronics, in wide band gap semiconductor materials, which enable highe…”
Lubershane: Islandable microgrids will deploy at megawatt EV charging depots
“The same expertise in in islandable large-scale power systems that are grid-connected but can take themselves offline, can provide peak capacity to the grid, can ensure that they're never drawing beyond a certain amount of capacity from the grid. Like, that sa…”
Lubershane: Ultra-dense batteries will commercialize in defense long before EVs
“Lithium-ion batteries we have today are kind of good enough from a range standpoint, so like, it would be cool to have a thousand watt-hour per kilogram battery, but not at four times the price. Like, I just don't, I think that would not get traction in the EV…”