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 41 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Shah: Existing grid capacity can handle load growth through 2034–2035
“The amount of load growth that we can handle, within the actual system that we've already paid for is gargantuan. It can easily take us through probably 2034, 20 35, right? Which, by which time we think nuclear will be more cost effective, enhanced geothermal …”
Shah: Every energy hard tech success required massive government support
“I don't think there's a single success story in hard tech not one in the energy space that didn't involve massive government involvement, right? Not one.”
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…”
Shah: Green ammonia is profitable today without any government subsidies
“Such that you know, I think green ammonia, you know, today is quite profitable without any subsidies at all even at today's cost of hydrogen, right?”
Shah: Developers finding US sites with sub-$35/MWh power 90% of the year
“They are finding many, many, many locations across this country where you can average less than 35 dollars a megawatt hour for 90% plus of the hours of the year on the LMP.”
Shah: EV boom will starve grid storage of lithium-ion batteries
“A lot of lithium ion battery capacity is going to be unavailable to the grid capacity marketplace once autos are ramping up.”
Shah: Non-lithium battery chemistries will reach commercial scale within five years
“I think we're actually five years away from all of those technologies being available at scale to the marketplace.”
Shah: All 15 US carbon black plants face EPA consent decrees
“And there's 15 major plants in the United States. All of them are under EPA, Department of Justice consent decrees. As of 2013, none of them had had Sox and Nox scrubbers on them, so the people who lived in those communities nearby were breathing in some of th…”
Shah: Climate tech startups understand equity but are unequipped for debt
“The vast majority of companies like Monolith that come into the loan programs office are experts at equity and not really well staffed on debt. And they don't really think debt, they think equity. And as a result, they think, The grass is always greener, and t…”
Shah: Solar and wind projects yield mere 2% to 4% returns
“They want at best, you know, high single-digit returns on their portfolio, and in most cases, the solar and wind industry are, you know, getting two, three, four percent returns, and that's after you assume forty-year life and all the other things that people …”
Shah: Getting tire giants to sign clean offtake contracts requires an act of God
“One thing with Goodyear and Michelin that I've found fascinating is that, and they're all good people, but like, they have a venture capital arm, right? And they have like, contract for differences, renewable energy, electricity contracts that they've signed f…”
Shah: Electric utilities value dispatchable home batteries over rooftop solar generation
“I think we're just at a point now where people recognize that what's really of value to the electric utility company is dispatchability. Right? It's not the generation of power on rooftops. It's the battery that's actually in the home.”
Shah: US electricity load growth is rising from 0.4% to 2.5% annually
“We are sitting in a moment right now where we are being told, and the data is suggesting that it's true, that we're going from 0.4% load growth a year to two to 2.5% load growth per year.”
Shah: Large warehouses have 200 TWh of cost-effective solar potential
“And when you look at, particularly for commercial distribution circuits you're talking about something on the order of 200 terawatt hours, right? Of cost-effective solar that can be put on warehouses that are four acres or larger in size, right?”
Shah: Full VPP software integration costs roughly $35 million per utility
“Our estimates is that this would cost roughly thirty-five million dollars per utility to put all the software layers in place from the venture-backed companies that have created them to be able to, you know, actually fully integrate this whole suite, right?”
Shah: DOE loan exclusively funds ACES hydrogen storage, not gas plant
“Our money is not being used at all for that. So our money, the project that we're funding is an electrolyzer project using a salt dome as storage, right? So none of our money is going to a new natural gas facility.”
Shah: Battery storage will relegate natural gas peakers strictly to emergencies
“The role of peaker plants is going to be moved increasingly to emergency situations, right? That you've got battery storage and lots of other technologies that are being used inside the Intermountain West. To be able to provide these sort of services. And so p…”
Shah: Announced hydrogen projects model power at $30 to $34 per MWh
“And remember, for a lot of the announced projects in the country, they're talking about 30 to 34 dollars a megawatt hour for the power, right? They're not talking about 12 dollars a megawatt hour for the power.”
Shah: ACES secured investment-grade rating, unlike most single-B DOE LPO projects
“This project is really well structured. It was rated at investment grade for the loan, so it's actually really well structured. Many of our projects are triple C or single B in terms of its shadow credit rating”
Shah: Hydrogen and ammonia create massive option value for renewable power
“So I just think that people are so myopic in the way that they think about traditional solar and wind models, that they think that the price of this stuff is going to zero. But in fact, the option value has now just gone up substantially.”
Shah: DOE Loan Programs Office backs misunderstood technologies, not binary risk
“We're not supposed to get involved in stuff that truly has binary risk associated with it. We're supposed to get involved where, you know, things are misunderstood.”
Shah: Wall Street banks admit DOE loan diligence is harder than theirs
“When I go to New York and talk to the big money center banks on Wall Street, they Often we'll say that the process of going through the loan programs office is as hard or harder than going through their process, and therefore, if someone successfully gets thro…”
Shah: Electricity distribution circuits are down to 20% asset utilization
“For many of us, because our distribution circuits have been upgraded so substantially, you're down to 20% asset utilization, right? So, like, so 20% of the total capacity of that circuit is being utilized, right?”
Shah: Backfeeding distributed power into the grid requires expensive infrastructure
“It is most certainly the case that if you want to backfeed power into the grid, then you will need a much more robust and expensive structure.”
Shah: ACES is the first commercial hydrogen storage salt dome
“Yeah, so, I mean, I don't think there's ever been a salt dome repurposed for hydrogen in this way and so there's certainly been test facilities that have been built in the past, but to our knowledge, there's never been a commercial hydrogen storage salt dome, …”
Shah: ACES electrolyzers will initially pull grid power matched by RECs
“So for the first iteration they're just getting connected to the grid, and there's going to be a network of contracts and racks to make sure that it's a hundred percent clean energy.”
Shah: Continuous electrolyzer operation yields sub-$4/kg clean hydrogen
“When you think about using these kinds of electrolyzers and running them all the time you really can get below four dollars a kilogram for clean hydrogen, right? And so but that does require you to get affordable electricity, but also very high run times, righ…”
Shah: Liquefied hydrogen shipping costs are generally over $8 per kilogram
“So then you end up with you end up with, you know, liquefied hydrogen, you know, shipments, which generally is very hard to do at less than eight or so dollars a kilogram of hydrogen.”
Shah: DOE Loan Programs Office provides market-rate debt, not subsidies
“I mean, in general, we're a liquidity instrument. We're not, A subsidy instrument, right? So maybe our interest rates are more competitive than commercial debt might be, but that's not intended to be a subsidy. It's intended to be you know, market rate debt”
Shah: Banks are actively debt-funding Texas battery storage on merchant curves
“They take merchant risk now. You see all of the battery storage deals that are getting debt funded in Texas on ERCOT merchant curves.”
Shah: LPO statute authorizes financing the first two to six facilities
“And our statute allows us to do the first, you know, two to six facilities.”
Shah: LPO due diligence costs climate tech borrowers up to $2M
“You do have to pay for all of our costs, which can easily be one and a half to two million dollars to sort of do due diligence on the project, right?”
Shah: Rocky Mountain Power pays battery rebates for 10-year dispatch rights
“Rocky Mountain Power has made it very clear that they view these behind-the-meter batteries as a certain value, and they're willing to pay you up front for it, and so they'll say, here's a big rebate, And now we get to do whatever we want within this service l…”
Shah: 400,000 MW of batteries are in US interconnection queues
“We have 400,000 megawatts of batteries in interconnection queues.”
Shah: DOE is underwriting ACES hydrogen loan solely to power offtake
“That's exactly right. We're underwriting to the power, and, you know, and the renewed generation facility will be owned by Intermountain Power Agency and so, so that, so, so that is what we're underwriting to.”