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 128 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
Bullard: Texas 2030 demand forecasts diverge between 1,000 TWh and 1,600 TWh
“ERCOT says, you know what, we could go from, like, a little under 500
Terawatt hours in 2024 to like a thousand by 20 30, right?
So let's call it, you know, up a 110% in that time period.
The transmission service providers on the other hand are like, sorry …”
Bullard: Texas electricity demand will land closer to ERCOT's lower 2030 forecast
“The true number is,
Either somewhere in between or much closer to ERCOT's figure.
I mean, ERCOT has the reason for demand, supply balancing, and upkeep, and everything else to get it really, really accurate in energy terms.
But the transmission service prov…”
EIA natural gas plant cost estimates ignore real-world regulatory and project evidence
“The gold standard here is the EIA's cost of generation publication that it does every couple of years. And they published this just in 20, 24, and the benchmark price, and after, after engineers had looked through it, was somewhere in the range of about 1100 t…”
Bullard: China's apparent oil demand likely peaked in 2023
“In terms of apparent demand, which is what the statistic is called, and it's basically looking at refinery runs in, in China, it's, looks like it's peaked at some point in 23 and the new data that was published as of yesterday morning shows that actually, stat…”
Bullard: ESG acts as a negative screen, not an alpha-generating thesis
“ESG is a set of issues, but it's not the same thing as a set of drivers. You know, they're issues to be aware of, screens and filters on making institutional investment, which is different than A, you know, an alpha case reasoned to invest capital in something…”
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…”
Bullard: Carbon removal is inherently a pure cost, requiring regulatory markets
“The challenge is that it is definitionally a cost. Like, it is definitionally a cost to remove carbon. And therefore, like, creating a market around that is a challenge, which is what, you know, the EU ETS did away with that by regulating it.”
Bullard: Clean Energy Transition Index gained 40% in 2025, beating Nasdaq
“Fenced off to the calendar year, 20, 25, and then calendar year, 20, 25 the S&P Global, the Clean Energy Transition Index, was up 40%, rebased value of a hundred at the start of the year, tips out at a 140 at the end. So more than the S&P and the NASDAQ 100, w…”
Bullard: China manufactures 42% of passenger cars, topping Japan's historical peak
“For the first three quarters of last year about 42% of all passenger vehicle manufacturing is in China last year. That's higher than the ratio for Japan ever was back in its heyday.”
Bullard: Planned combined-cycle gas plant capital costs will double by 2030
“You know on the order of, like, more than a 160 active plants, like close to about 80 gigawatts worth of actual capacity, in which the cost of a combined cycle has doubled. Like, twenty-twenty-six deliveries, things that are gonna come online this year, are in…”
Bullard: Tech CapEx has likely not peaked and will rise next year
“This is probably not the peak. Like, most of the estimates based on what companies themselves are saying for their estimated CapEx have a higher number for next year, right?”
Bullard: Data centers represent only 8% of global electricity demand growth
“Space cooling, so just aircon and buildings is gonna be, like, 10% of the total growth. And data centers are right around eight percent.”
Data center power demand marks the biggest shift since initial U.S. electrification
“We're now in a place that we probably haven't seen since the U.S. Was being electrified full stop, where people are showing up and saying, hello, I have one thing that will materially change the shape of load and demand pretty much forever.”
Current grid operators lack the institutional experience to manage rapid load growth
“I don't think that really anyone has got the muscle for this because it's not been in anybody's lived experience really. And so we're having to think about it pretty fresh.”
Data centers tolerate power price hikes far better than industrial steelmakers do
“If you jack the price of electricity, 30% for somebody that makes steel using an electric arc furnace, it will materially impact the cost of the steel that is being made. If you do the same for people that are doing data center operations especially for traini…”
New U.S. natural gas plants cost $2,240 per kilowatt, doubling recent estimates
“We've got about 55 gigawatts of plants. Like more than a hundred individual plants, and way more than that number of different generators. And what we see is that, actually, his number's not bad. 2400 dollars a kilowatt. What we see by twenty-thirty-one, twent…”
Bullard: US energy storage investment now surpasses wind investment
“Solar is just on its way up. You know, it's more than forty billion dollars in the trail in 12 months. And storage now invests more than wind does in the States.”
Bullard: ERCOT cumulative solar will probably overtake wind in 2025
“You know this year, we're probably gonna have more solar installed in toto, cumulative, than wind.”
Bullard: DeepSeek was funded with $5.5M from a Chinese hedge fund
“DeepSeek is an open source, small model. It was funded with 5.5 million dollars from a Chinese hedge fund.”
Bullard: DeepSeek V3 matched Meta Llama 3.1 using under 2.8M GPU hours
“And the sort of benchmark to compare it to would be the Lama 3.1 model from meta, which had four and five billion parameters and just under thirty one million training hours. And deep seek is getting similar results of V three with six hundred and seventy one …”
Bullard: Data centers consumed nearly 26% of Virginia's power in 2023
“Virginia is, you know, 30, just under 34 terawatt hours of power consumed by data centers in 2020 three, and almost 26% of state power already going to that.”
Bullard: Rappahannock received single interconnection requests 4x its peak load
“Rappahannock had this filing in, in Virginia, where they basically are saying, look, like, we are now getting requests for interconnection. That in a single location are bigger than our entire peak load right now. We have a peak load of 1.2 gigawatts. We have …”
Bullard: Energy accounts for only 1.7% to 6.3% of AI training costs
“The energy component of that comes way after the AI accelerator chips, the other server components, the interconnection costs, and it's somewhere between 1.7 and 6.3% of the cost of training and experimentation.”
Bullard: Historical aerosol emissions have masked 0.57°C of global warming
“And then the aerosols that we've been pumping into the atmosphere for a 175 years, reduce the warming effect by .57 degrees C, which is obviously massive, like an obviously massive, significant thing.”
Bullard: Larry Fink's letters dropped climate mentions from 45 to five
“I would just go through there and count up how many times did he talk about sustainability and climate, and in twenty-twenty, it was, you know, a combined, like, 45 times almost. In twenty-twenty-one, he mentioned not only sustainability and climate, but he me…”
Bullard: US ESG reports with data tables dropped to 54%
“So the number of reports that had an ESG data table, okay, like, to my mind, the minimum good grace you could give an analyst reading has gone from 76% to 54%. The number of reports that had a press release has gone down from about 76% to 50%. And now, only 20…”
Bullard: Obfuscating ESG data backfires by giving analysts more interpretive discretion
“It's also, I think, in the long run, maybe a pyrrhic victory to sort of obfuscate your data by not putting it into a table, because for one thing, people will get it, and they may be less sympathetic to your position if they had to, Do a lot of extra work to g…”
Bullard: Europe holds 84% of global sustainable assets under management
“Europe is 84% of the almost three trillion dollars of assets under management, sustainable assets under management at the end of last year, and the U.S. Is 11%.”
Bullard: Long-term carbon markets need better application of standards, not more standards
“I don't think that in the long run, markets are asking for more standards. They're asking for better application of a number of standards.”
Bullard: AI data center load growth mirrors greenfield smelting era
“I'm planning for industrial load growth of the sort that grids haven't known since maybe they were building greenfield smelting capacities or things like that.”
Bullard: The Answer to AI Energy Growth Is Probably AI Applications
“The answer to AI data consumption growth or energy consumption growth is probably AI, finding other applications for it, and we see these from some of the providers.”
Bullard: Global per capita greenhouse gas emissions peaked in the 1970s
“And the result is that on a per capita basis we had all greenhouse gas emissions peak in the 19 seventies. In particular methane and nitrous oxide emissions were peaking in the 19 seventies. CO₂ emissions didn't peak, but Into well into this century per capita…”
Bullard: Markets are created by removing legacy subsidies, not just adding new ones
“You know, we think about markets being willed into being by a new subsidy coming into place, or a new support mechanism, but they're also willed into being by other mechanisms going away.”
Bullard: Global car sales peaked at 85M and dropped below 70M
“So, like, not only did sales peak at about eighty-five million and decline to below seventy million as of the third quarter last year on a trailing twelve-month basis.”
Bullard: EVs account for more than 100% of auto industry growth
“More than a hundred percent of the auto industry's growth It's coming from electric vehicles. Like, they are the only growth, ah, cohort within cars.”
Bullard: Mineral processing, not extraction, is the clean tech bottleneck
“You know, the determining step for so many of these things is not fundamentally, you know, acts, access or availability within the earth's crust, but where it is that it gets processed.”
Bullard: Solar projects average 1% cost overruns compared to large infrastructure
“The mean cost overrun for solar power is one percent, and only two percent of solar projects ever have a cost overrun of more than 50%.”
Bullard: Only 1.2% of Fortune 100 board members have energy expertise
“Like you find 1.2% of the Fortune 100 board knows anything about energy.”
Bullard: 38% of US corn crop meets only 10% of gasoline demand
“So we grow in the range of about fourteen billion bushels of corn every year in the United States. Of that, last year, 38% of it went to ethanol that's being used for fuels. Which means that about 40% of the U.S. Corn crop meets about 10% of our motor gasoline…”
Bullard: Global agricultural land use peaked around 2000 at over 37%
“We had a peak in the total percentage of global land area used for agriculture right around the turn of the millennium, a little bit more than 37%. And let's be clear, it hasn't come down massively. It's come down maybe one percent of total global land area.”
Bullard: Small shifts in China's coal use equal a top-10 nation's power demand
“China's little moves in coal consumption are like the size of top 10 country electricity consumption in any given year.”
Bullard: Political anti-ESG sentiment is almost uniquely a US phenomenon
“Anti-ESG sentiment is at the political level almost uniquely U.S. It's something that happens really only here. It's not nearly as big of a topic in Europe at a sort of polity level, or definitely not at like a local politics level”
Bullard: Four-hour battery storage system costs surged 25% in 2022
“The four-hour system cost for, you know, an energy storage system went up 25% last year.”
Bullard: US carbon pricing programs fail to send strong market signals
“None of the programs that we have in the United States are priced according to really send a massive market signal that wasn't already perhaps sent by something like a renewable portfolio standard.”
Bullard: Web3 projects often use carbon markets to solve tech problems
“The question we need to ask ourselves, is this tech solving carbon markets problems, or are these carbon markets solving tech problems? You know are we seeing people attracted to fundamentally, I want to solve the issues of the carbon market and web three and …”
Nat Bullard: IEA projects 5M barrels per day global oil oversupply
“The IEA estimate for the beginning of the year is about five million barrels per day of supply in excess of demand. That is a lot. That's, Also about five percent oversupply based on based on the current demand of around a hundred and a little bit million barr…”