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 447 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 9 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
Kann: Software engineering is the only job category truly displaced by AI to date
“And in fact, the only jobs that have been lost really because of AI to date are like software engineers.”
Kann: Electric vehicles will never discharge to the grid at scale
“I do not think we'll ever see vehicles discharging into the grid at scale.”
Kann: Sulfur injection could cool Earth 0.5°C for $2 billion
“Specifically, you might be able to get about a half a degree Celsius of global cooling out of stratospheric sulfur injection for a couple of billion dollars, which is nothing, basically, comparatively.”
Kann: Data centers lower local electricity rates but increase macro power prices
“At the local level, data centers seem to on balance, probably decrease electricity prices currently. And at the macro level, they are definitely a factor contributing to an increase in electricity prices.”
Kann: V2G economics do not pencil for EV drivers with $7,000 hardware
“GM, for example, their bi-directional charging bundle runs about 7000 dollars before installation. And grid programs so far have paid drivers a lot less than that. It just doesn't pencil.”
Kann: Power is the rate limiter to AI growth
“And understanding the multiple factors that drive failure of new transmission, I think, is key to understanding why power is, in my opinion, The rate limiter to AI growth, and why upward pressure on electricity prices will probably sustain for a while.”
Kann: Almost none of the 50 GW data center pipeline is off-grid
“There's like, 50 gigawatts of behind-the-meter generation and development at data centers, right? And they, and some people have interpreted that to be, oh, 50 gigawatts of off-grid data centers getting built. It's actually close to zero of those that are true…”
Kann: 300 MW data centers have lower cost per FLOP than edge
“My guess is, you know, your 300 megawatt data center on a fully loaded levelized cost of flop is just gonna be cheaper.”
Kann rejects Musk's claim that orbital data centers will be cheapest soon
“Because I think that orbital data, I mean, Elon says he thinks that they will be the cheapest way to get new compute in, like, three to five years. I do not think that is possible. Not in that time period.”
Kann predicts US electricity prices will rise over the next three years
“But I could tell you, I think over the next three years, you know, electricity prices are probably going up, not down.”
Kann: Solar geoengineering could deliver 0.5°C cooling for two billion dollars
“The rough estimates, just to an order of magnitude, are that, at least what I've seen, it might cost a couple billion dollars to deliver something like a half a degree of cooling, half a degree centigrade of cooling.”
AI training data centers run dummy workloads to flatten dangerous power spikes
“What they do in large part, because those spikes are actually problematic, not just to the grid, but to the equipment inside the data center as well. So what they do at least sometimes to manage that is they create dummy workloads. So they keep the power profi…”
Kann: Data centers will partner with DER aggregators for grid capacity
“We're just starting to see this wave of announcements that are inexorably coming where there are going to be partnerships between hyperscalers or data center operators and the Third parties who do aggregations of DERs to deliver capacity to get data centers on…”
Grid interconnection is faster than building new nuclear in most locations
“Most places you can get interconnected faster than you can build the new nuclear reactor.”
Kann: Geoengineering is too cheap to support large venture market sizes
“It's actually hard to get to a big market size for it, ultimately, because it is so cheap. Like, I don't remember exactly the number, but we did an episode on this, like, I don't know, a couple years ago, and it was something like a couple billion dollars migh…”
Kann: Make Sunsets' rule-flouting balloon releases are the wrong approach for SRM
“There is another startup called Make Sunsets, which a lot of people have heard about, who has decided to just do SRM brazenly in the open, kind of flouting all rules and regulations to the extent that they can. I actually went to a party a couple years ago whe…”
Kann: Rising electricity prices are the biggest risk to EV adoption
“To me, you know, the biggest risk to EV adoption right now, above all else, is rising electricity prices.”
Kann: A US nuclear power renaissance will happen despite realistic timeline hurdles
“I'm now very optimistic about it. I'm realistic about the timeframe of it, I think. Which is, a lot of people are not, but I do think it's going to happen.”
Kann: Being green and more expensive is insufficient for climate tech demand
“The big lesson of the current state of affairs in climate tech is that in a lot of the subcategories of the market,
Being clean, being green, whatever, is insufficient.
Being ex but clean particularly if it's ex but clean and more expensive.
Is just not eno…”
Data center developers are crowding out sites for new U.S. manufacturing electrification
“I can tell you for certain that it is getting harder and harder to find a site to put any of that stuff because there are data center developers hunting around the entire country trying to find anywhere where that is possible. So it's making it, and that's dif…”
Kann: The US lacks end-user demand for 1,000 new hyperscale data centers
“And I will state categorically, I don't think there will be a thousand new Hyperscale data centers in the United States anytime soon. I don't think there's actually that much demand for it.”
Kann: US data center capacity will more than double by 2030
“I was on the side of, we will see total capacity of data centers as measured in megawatts, or gigawatts, I guess, really double by twenty-thirty, and I was on the side that we will see it more than double.”
Kann: Carbon removal startup oversupply will force a market reckoning
“I think the overwhelming likelihood is that we're in for a bit of a reckoning in that market. In that market, I mean, both the general voluntary carbon market, and more specifically, the CDR market. Not to say everything fails, but there's just the, there's an…”
Khan: Clean tech startups need a 5x-10x improvement to beat scaling incumbents
“If you're building something that you think is a better mousetrap, like, it's 20% better, Than whatever the incumbent technology is. In all likelihood, your reaction, my reaction, when we see a company that's doing that is like, 20% better is not better enough…”
Khan: There are more carbon removal startups than meaningful buyers
“Depending on how you want to define it, I'm pretty sure there are more carbon removal startups than there are carbon removal buyers, at least at any scale, like meaningful scale of buyers.”
Kann predicts US data center capacity will double by 2030.
“I'm on the oversight here. I'm betting that there will be more than 20 gigawatts of new data center capacity in the United States by then.”
Kann: US is unlikely to build significant new nuclear capacity this decade
“It's unlikely we're going to see a lot of new nuclear capacity built in the United States this decade, and even the first few projects that are going to get built, those are going to be quite expensive.”
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…”
Kann: Solar radiation management offers ultra-cheap cooling compared to carbon removal
“One of the things that we do know as pretty likely is that it's possible you could do solar radiation management that would deliver substantial reduction in warming for a very, very, very low cost relative to all the other approaches that we're seeing out ther…”
Kann: Permitting is the single biggest bottleneck facing decarbonization
“I think if you forced me to pick, I would probably pick permitting just because it will affect a broader swath of the market.”
Kann: Markets solve supply chain bottlenecks, but not permitting or transmission
“The rest of these, I think, not that I'm like a
Pure Chicago-style economists, but I think the market ultimately solves most of them.
Transmission and permitting don't fall into a category that the market ultimately solves, necessarily, because, as you said,…”
Kann: Startups relying on zero-cost energy must show positive unit economics today
“We see a lot of startups who are doing something where their sort of fundamental assumption is marginal cost of energy is going towards zero, and maybe that, that could be true over a longer time horizon, but show me how you can deliver positive unit economics…”
Kann: Interconnection may be the biggest bottleneck to the energy transition
“Like, I think interconnection may end up being The single largest bottleneck to the energy transition, or even climate tech across all things”
Kann: Electrolyzer winners will be determined by scaling speed, not paper specs
“One of the other lessons from solar was like the best technology on paper did not necessarily win out. What won out at the end of the day was who could get to scale and who could manufacture quickly when the market was ramping. And I think we'll see something …”
Kann: Supply crunch creates opening for alternative grid battery chemistries
“And I think this is creating an opening For a bunch of alternative chemistries, flow batteries, sodium batteries, zinc-based batteries, metal air batteries, a bunch of other technologies that, that do look really interesting on paper and have specs that lithiu…”
Kann: Web3 cannot solve the shortage of high-quality carbon credits
“The actual challenge is A very limited supply of high quality carbon credits or carbon removals and a huge supply of really low quality, really bad carbon credits or offsets. That is the actual problem, and Web three is not really a solution to that.”
Kann: Solar power prices may stay steady or rise over next few years
“Though the long-term trajectory for solar is probably still going to be cost declines it's possible for the next couple of years, at least, we will see steady to increasing Prices for solar projects or for electricity from solar”
Kann: Sustainable aviation fuel will ultimately displace less than 50% of demand
“What portion of 100% can we get to with sustainable aviation fuel? I don't have the number for you exactly because it's contingent on a bunch of these other Sort of like upstream questions, I think, but I don't think it's 50%, ultimately.”
Kann: Carbon removal cannot reach gigaton scale without policy mandates
“So the obvious example of this is carbon removal, where I think anybody who looks at this would admit that in the longterm, this market does not scale without substantial policy intervention. Like this has to become mandated in some fashion or another. Otherwi…”
Kann: Climate tech's next decade is electrochemistry vs. biology
“I think the greatest battle in climate tech over the next decade is going to be a race between electrochemistry and biology to solve our biggest climate problems.”
Kann: Cleantech 1.0 losses were concentrated in thin film, biofuels, and Better Place
“So the big categories of where the money pits in cleantech one.o were thin film solar. Like you said, alternatives to silicon for PV, biofuels, and then one big money pit, which was, you said battery swapping, it was Better Place... If you subtract those three…”
Kann: Data centers entering a community tend to lower local electricity rates
“The objective truth, particularly today, is that a data center coming into a community tends to lower rates because nowadays, you
You know, the deal that the utility is striking with the data center is basically guaranteed to do that, sort of the whole point.”
Kann: Political backlash against data centers will worsen over the next two years
“I would bet on this being the case for the next couple of years that it gets worse before it gets better. Partially because of the political timing that you described, it's just there currently where we stand today, there is no political advantage to being the…”
Kann: Critics calling the grid 'broken' do not understand utility operations
“But I will admit a little bit of frustration with a particular crowd That is constantly referencing the, quote, broken grid, unquote, that needs fixing, knowing full well that most of these people have absolutely no idea how utilities actually work.”
States use tech hyperscalers' ratepayer pledge to fight transmission tariffs
“In their complaints to FERC, for example, a bunch of states have cited that pledge, and I think that creates it's an opening for any time anyone wants to argue against however a tariff is getting structured, or a new transmission line, or whatever it might be …”
Kann: China's fossil fuel electricity generation has stayed flat for years
“Fossil generation in China has been flat now for a couple of years. It's not just a one-year anomaly. It basically flattened off and has stayed that way.”