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 77 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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: 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: 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.”
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: 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: 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: 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.”
Kann: Edge computing latency advantage applies to very few AI applications
“Not for zero applications, but for very few does it seem that you need such low latency that edge has a big benefit over, you know, the sort of, like, regional hyperscale model that we have today.”
Kann: Rountree's Deep Tech Thesis Excludes Most Startups in the Space
“I think it's correct, but it also describes a world that honestly excludes the vast majority of startups in this space.”
Kann: Sodium-ion battery hype is justified as CATL actively deploys them
“I think there is a degree of hype that is warranted, largely because it seems pretty clear that some of the big Chinese manufacturers, CATL included, are investing a lot in sodium ion and are actually deploying.”
Kann: Very few asset-light energy startups produce massive venture outcomes
“For all the talk that I often hear, I'm sure many of you hear from many of my peer venture capitalists about asset light, low capital intensity startups in this space, The reality, in my humble opinion, is that there's actually very little historical evidence …”
Kann: Electric stoves are a small household load not worth prioritizing
“It is a small load in the house. If you, what you care about is, you know, electrifying stuff, you should, you really push people toward electric vehicles and electric HVAC and stoves don't really matter at the end of the day. So I just don't get it. I don't g…”
Kann: The current climate tech downturn fell steeper than Cleantech 1.0
“One difference between this time and last time in my mind is that the fall from glory has been a lot steeper and faster, because it was really driven by a political change, the change in administration, and then the swiftness with which that new administration…”
Kann: Plastics are a smaller climate challenge because petroleum remains locked inside
“And I don't worry personally about the fact that plastics use petroleum inherently because that petroleum is locked up inside the plastic. It's not being emitted as CO two into the atmosphere generally. So I think that plastic is a climate Challenge, but I thi…”
Kann: Uneven Tax Credit Eligibility Poses Greater Risk Than Full Expiration
“To me, the trickiest thing is, is if we're entering this period wherein some projects will qualify for a substantial, like it's 30% tax credit. If you still get the, you know, domestic content bonus, coal communities, et cetera, like you can get, they're big c…”
Khan: Industrial Labor Demographic Shifts Will Take Decades to Drive AI Adoption
“It's one of these things, though, that I do think is a big macro driver, but it's not like an, it's like climate change in some ways. It's like, it's going to take decades to play out, and that's like one of the problems with it, is that there's no immediate, …”
Khan: Siting optimization for energy developers cannot build venture-scale businesses
“I do think there is value in that. I don't think you can build an enormous venture grade business just doing that.”
Kann: FOAK remains the only real valley of death in climate tech
“And listen, I think this remains today the real valley of death. There aren't really any other values of death at this point in my mind. The capital stack for climate tech companies is, is actually pretty strong, even in light of the market having shifted a fa…”
Kann: Climate tech TEA modeling is often done poorly, even by veterans
“And we think it is often done poorly, even sometimes by very experienced entrepreneurs.”
Khan: DAC needs more startup approaches despite an impending reckoning
“There's an extent to which I still want more mousetraps in DAC, despite I think what's going to be a pretty painful reckoning in the startup landscape, just because I think we need to find something that is truly cheap enough. If we're going to do DAC at scale…”
Kann: AI Power Demand Is Undeniably Slowing Down Industrial Electrification
“I think it is undeniably gumming up the works right now, if you are trying to accelerate electrification of other stuff as quickly as you possibly can, particularly industrial stuff.”
Kann: High power costs, not permitting, drive industrial projects from California
“The, I would say that the limiting factor that I've seen over and over again these days is not as much permitting as it is the cost of power, which is which has become insanely high in California, and that ends up like pushing people out of state more than any…”
Kann: Novel biomass CDR ideas carry severe feedstock and scalability risks
“I see a lot of novel ideas around biomass-based CDR, and every one of them scares me specifically because of the question of where is the feedstock going to come from, how is it going to scale, and are there going to be a bunch of negative side effects when th…”
Tech sector climate goals make data center load growth a net positive
“I generally think on balance, it's good because those customer sets tend to be particularly progressive when it comes to climate issues, and they're willing to put their money where their mouth is and take some risks that, that others will not.”
Kann: Going off-grid is never economical with existing macro grid access
“You just don't see that working out economically for any customer who has access to the macro grid.”
Kann: California net metering reforms appropriately value grid-timed distributed energy
“In my mind, high level without sort of getting into the nuances of that specific policy, like that is appropriately valuing those resources. It's saying if you, if the resource can actually alleviate a challenge on the grid, which is a real thing in California…”
Kann: Electric stoves are overhyped because cooking emissions are negligible
“The reason that I think it is overhyped is that from a climate context, I don't think it really matters. Like at the end of the day, it's not, your stove is not a significant load in your home, and so you can electrify it or not, and I guess maybe it matters i…”
Kann: The voluntary carbon market is broken and full of vaporware
“I agree that that market is a mess and broken, and there's a lot of vaporware there.”
Kann: Meeting power demand is US climate progress's biggest near-term roadblock
“It is, in my humble opinion, the single biggest near-term roadblock to significant climate progress, at least in the U.S.”
Kann is skeptical LLMs will fundamentally change climate tech and energy
“I have generally been a bit more skeptical than most, I think, that it would change, fundamentally change at least, the things that I spend my professional time on, which is to say climate tech and energy.”
Kann: Voluntary carbon market's core trust issues remain unchanged today
“But I would argue that the fundamental problems that plagued the market when I was a wee young analyst are basically unchanged today. We still have not yet figured out how to build enough trust in this market to see its scale.”
Kann: Commodity chemical decarbonization may favor electrochemistry over synbio
“So we're talking about stuff like ethylene and propanol, a bunch of these big commodity chemical categories, which are much bigger markets, bigger decarbonization impact ultimately, but less complex molecules to create and processes where sort of traditional c…”
Kann: Backlash against unfettered solar geoengineering is probably the right move
“I think a swift regulatory or political backlash to, like, totally unfettered solar geoengineering is probably the right thing.”
Kann: Thermostat grid value cannot support multiple layers of intermediaries
“The amount of economic value you can extract from a thermostat in response to grid signals is not nothing, but it's not enough to allow for, you know, three different intermediaries to take a slice of the pie.”
Kann: Soil carbon removal fails on measurement, permanence, and additionality metrics
“The bad news is that on all the measures that we really care about when we think about quote unquote quality for carbon removal credits, these practices are pretty challenged. Measurement and verification, permanence, additionality, and so on, which doesn't me…”
Kann: Only Opower historically built scalable consumer energy data businesses
“But I would say that historically no one, save maybe for Opower, figured out a truly scalable business surrounding this data.”
Kann: Subsidizing corn for ethanol was a bad idea for the climate
“This is the issue that we created with all of our ethanol subsidies. We grow a lot of corn, use it exclusively to Produce ethanol. I think generally that is viewed as having been a bad idea from a climate perspective, at least.”
Kann: Limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C requires gigatons of carbon removal
“There is no realistic pathway for us to get to one and a half degrees Celsius of temperature rise or even really two degrees without substantial carbon, carbon removal. There's just no way we're going to do it. And substantial being gigatons.”
Kann: Bitcoin mining is new load that does not decarbonize anything
“And Bitcoin certainly does not help with that, right? It is new load that is not itself decarbonizing anything.”
Kann: Scaling biomass carbon removal faces severe bottlenecks from competing land uses
“I'm actually probably less concerned about that than I am concerned about the biomass-based approaches in the long term, because if those are really going to scale, like, we can use waste biomass till the cows come home, so to speak, today but there are going …”
Kann: Carbon markets cannot scale to gigaton levels without centralized caps
“You don't need to set a centralized cap For example, if you've got a really well-organized crypto-driven carbon market, but I guess I'm skeptical that it scales to that level without the cap getting set.”
Kann: 80% of climate tech tasks require chemical or biological conversion
“Probably 80% of the things we need to do in climate tech can be solved either by biologically or electrochemically converting Thing X into thing Y.”
Kann: Google has the best community playbook among data center developers
“Google maybe is the best at this, have a playbook where you address all of those things as close to upfront as you can, and you offer a lot in exchange to the community.”
Kann: Autonomy breeds vehicle electrification and accelerates EV adoption
“Autonomous vehicles are almost certainly endemically electric vehicles. Like, it makes more sense for them to be electric vehicles, and the proof is in the pudding. All of the autonomous vehicles on the road today are electric vehicles, right? That is true of …”