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 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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: Nuclear capital cost per kilowatt exceeds highly curtailed renewables
“When you look at the capital cost per kilowatt of nuclear with everything that is known today, it's much more expensive than even highly curtailed renewables.”
Baglino: Solid-State Transformers Will Replace Passive Ones
“I believe that solid-stage transformers are going to replace passive ones.”
Baglino: Data center rack voltages will reach 800V+ with SST architecture
“Now the backplane voltage of the racks will be 800 volts or even higher. And then you can use a SST based solution to go from medium voltage, 34 KV all the way to 800 volts with no gray space rooms with UPSs and power distribution panels and anything like that…”
Baglino: SSTs eliminate 70% of data center electrical components and footprint
“And you can remove 70% of the stuff in the in the electrical diagram and a similar amount of footprint”
Baglino: Solid-state transformers can match traditional transformer costs while adding grid functions
“An SST can have a cost similar to a traditional oil-filled transformer but at the same time provide functions that would be That would be provided by popcorn components around the transformer. Functions like overcurrent protection, fault isolation, what an aut…”
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…”
Baglino: Solid-state transformers are 50 to 100x more power dense
“So when we do this with a solid state transformer, we basically move the 60 hertz transformer to a hundred kilohertz transformer, And that makes it much smaller, like, 50 to a hundred times more power dense”
Baglino: Heron Link eliminates transformers and capacitors from solar diagrams
“What we remove from the single line diagram is we remove the legacy transformer. We remove that six, 90 volt, you know, breaker or fuses protection there. And we also, because we don't have that medium voltage transformer anymore with the inductance of that me…”
Baglino: Central inverters average 97.5% to 98% availability, leading solar plant underperformance
“Solar inverters are the largest source of underperformance on utility-scale solar plants. It's not the modules. You'd think it would be the modules, because there's so many of them, and they're out in the field, and you worry about hail, and you worry about wh…”
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…”
Baglino: Overbuilding renewables for winter enables cheap, flexible electrification
“With the current known technology costs for different types of storage and different types of generation, what the model does is it really Largely overbuilds renewables to solve the winter scenario, right? And now you have this large overbuilt renewable base. …”
Baglino: Memory and Chip Interfaces Are Biggest Bottleneck in AI Hardware
“One of the biggest bottlenecks for everything that's going on with AI is actually the interfaces, the memory interfaces, the data interfaces from chip to chip, all those things. And those have not seen as much innovation, actually.”
Baglino: AI Investment May See Correction Without Real Revenue Inflow
“Until there's applications where there's real money flowing in the other direction, we may see a little bit of a correction as well.”
Baglino: Government will use rail and highway corridors for transmission if pressured
“And if this becomes enough of a hot button issue, I see we will be, I think the government will do that.”
Baglino: High-voltage underground cables are comparable in size to fiber bundles
“Those fiber bundles are not that much smaller or different in size than what you would bury for a high voltage transmission line”
Baglino: Total annual global mining outweighs renewable buildout materials 10x
“One of the fun things that we put in the paper was a comparison of how much material humans just move out of the ground every year in total, and the amount of material required for just the This renewable energy economy, and it's actually like a factor of 10, …”
Baglino: Silicon carbide inverters saved Tesla $400 to $500 in battery costs
“You know, while I was at Tesla, we started using silicon carbide to make drive inverters in cars because the incremental cost of the more expensive transistor was more than outweighed by the savings in battery because the drive inverter could be so much more e…”
Baglino: Silicon carbide doubled the power density of Tesla onboard chargers
“And so we really wanted to make the onboard charger smaller, so we used these early silicon carbide devices to make the onboard charger. Yeah, I think we reduced, increased its power density by, like, a factor of two. We dramatically reduced its cost.”
Baglino: Silicon carbide in Tesla inverters saved three miles of battery
“So silicon carbide went there, and then silicon carbide went into the drive inverter to make the drive inverter about one percent more efficient, which you're like, oh, that doesn't seem like a lot, but when you think about, you size the battery to give you, l…”
Baglino: Step-up transformer demand has surged over 250% since 2019
“In fact, I have some statistics here. You know, power transformers, these are generator transformers. Demand is up is over double since 2019. For generation step-up transformers it's up over 250%. Distribution transformers up over a hundred percent.”
Baglino: Utility-scale solar plant transformers fail at about 1.4% per year
“Transformers are not really designed to run at their rated power, you know, as long as they do in these Desert power plants, you know, where they're, first of all, very hot, because they're sitting in the sun, and second of all, because they're running at name…”
Baglino: Electrification delivers nearly 3x boost in primary-to-end-use efficiency
“And so when you stack that all up and you replace that with a renewable electrified pathway, you can get almost a tripling of end use efficiency, well, sort of well to wheel or primary energy to end use efficiency boost, which actually is the, One of the first…”
Baglino: Heat pump adoption faces electrical panel and cold-climate bottlenecks
“I think it's going to be a little bit harder with heat pumps and there's a couple reasons why that is. One is the main panel can be a bottleneck. Not everybody has room for a heat pump, especially in, let's say, colder areas where the heat requirements are hig…”
Tesla Excluded Long-Duration Energy Storage From Master Plan Due to Data Gaps
“We didn't really include long duration energy storage in this paper at all, because we don't have access to any third party costs, numbers that we can, you know, really depend on, or performance.”
Baglino: Tesla Master Plan Soaks Up Curtailed Power With Hydrogen and EV Charging
“We're doing hydrogen and storing hydrogen in the summer and then using that hydrogen to produce clean fuels on a, on an annualized basis and also using that hydrogen for Ammonia production and steel and other things. And so we are trying to do some things to l…”
Baglino: China and Netherlands lack dynamic EV charging despite prevalent chargers
“The interesting thing about both China and the Netherlands which are my most personal recent experiences with, you know, truly prevalent charging everywhere. They're really not doing this, even though they're charging everywhere.”
Baglino: Typical post-1970 home electrical panels rarely exceed 50 amps
“If you actually look at the typical home built after the seventies, you know, or maybe even the sixties in some cases, there's a 200 amp main panel that barely ever peaks above 50 amps.”
Baglino: Clean energy material recycling will make long-term supply manageable
“These materials, once they're kind of deployed, they will be redeployed in some fashion with not perfect recovery, but to the point where the ongoing resource requirement is just, is not that challenging.”
Baglino: US industrial policies like CHIPS Act will rebuild capital project ecosystems
“Things like the CHIPS Act and other stuff that the U.S. Is Industrial policy that's really driving investment in large capital projects will build that ecosystem back, and then it will be easier to get these things done.”
Baglino: Higher frequency linearly reduces transformer size and power electronics costs
“The best way to make power electronics Systems that involve isolation more affordable is go up in frequency, because to get isolation, you basically need to use a transformer of some type, and transformers become smaller as you go up in frequency. It's just a,…”
Baglino: Mechanical grid switches only last a few thousand actuations
“It actuates in hundreds of milliseconds and can actuate, you know, once every couple of minutes, and it's really not meant to actuate more than, like, a couple thousand times in its total lifetime.”
Baglino: Silicon carbide devices now operate up to 4.6 kV
“Silicon carbide 10 years ago was 600 volts or 1.2 kilovolts. You know, nowadays they're silicon carbide devices that are 2.3 KV capable or 4.6 KV capable.”
Baglino: Very few utility-scale transformers are manufactured in the US
“The transformers are generally made these days in, like, China, India, and Mexico. Very few of them are actually made in the US.”
Baglino: Average drivers only need to charge EVs every 3-4 days
“The average person driving, you know, less than 40 miles a day on average. In fact, like the 95th percentile trip is, is, is like 40 miles. You only really need to charge today's EVs with ranges of 200 to 300 miles once every Three days, four days”