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 80 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: 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: 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: 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…”
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: 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…”
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: 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: 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: 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…”
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 predicts his four-year-old son will never get a driver's license
“One of the bets is that he will never drive a car. He'll never get a driver's license. I mean, he's growing up, you know, in kind of suburban Bay Area, California, so take that into account, because this is a specific bet to my son. But, you know, I think 12 y…”
Kann predicts US energy startup funding will boom and triple in 2026
“So I think we're going to see, this is going to be a return to a boom, this is my prediction right now, where, yeah, we were at two billion last year, down from eight billion in twenty-twenty-two. I don't know that we get back to eight, but like, Will it tripl…”
Kann: Co-located gas power will remain a minority of new data centers
“I think it's going to end up being the minority of new data centers, not the majority of new data centers.”
Kann: Generating capacity is not the primary bottleneck for near-term load growth
“There also though has been a lot of good data to suggest that generating capacity in the next few years is not the dominant
Like, there is enough capacity in enough places to deliver the kind of load growth for the next few years that the grid will need.
So I …”
Kann: Transformer manufacturing capacity will expand and bring down lead times
“I do think we also will see a lot of new transformer manufacturing capacity come online in the next few years. It's, the lead times are gonna come down, and I think we'll see a wave of new technology.”
Kann: Upstart hardware companies will help bridge the transformer supply gap
“I think there's going to be a wave of upstart companies, whether they're doing traditional oil-filled transformers or solid-state stuff like Heron is doing. I think they're going to fill in a lot of the supply gap in the next few years”
Kann: The nuclear reactor market will consolidate into a three-OEM oligopoly
“I personally think in the long run, nuclear probably ends up looking like gas turbines look today, which is there, you know, in the gas turbine world, there are basically three Three OEMs that control like 70, 75% of the market. It's an oligopoly, essentially.…”
Kann: DAC firms signing fixed-price long-term contracts will go underwater
“Because this is another thing that I don't see a lot of companies thinking about is they're trying to sign 10 or 20 year contracts, but they're making them fixed price. I think they end up underwater at some point if they do that.”
Kann predicts delivered electricity costs will rise for the foreseeable future
“The delivered cost of electricity is, The trajectory of it is the opposite direction, and I think it's going to be the opposite direction for a while.”
Kann: Clean energy delivered costs may rise in the short-to-medium term
“In the short to maybe midterm the actual delivered cost of energy or, you know, mobility, if you're an electric vehicle on or whatever it is, it might go up if you're choosing the clean option.”
Shayle Kann: Achieving climate goals likely requires massive carbon capture deployment
“Well, whether we like it or not, we are probably going to have to use carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS, and lots of it in this world, if we want to achieve any of our reasonable climate goals.”
Shayle Kann: World will likely need to go globally net negative
“We are going to get to net zero and then probably need to go even further and become net negative globally because we will have overshot our carbon budget.”
Kann: China is unlikely to become a massive clean hydrogen importer
“It doesn't make sense to me that China would become a massive hydrogen importer. It feels like exactly the kind of thing hydrogen would self produce if they need a lot of clean hydrogen”
Kann: IRA will impact climate tech like 2008 stimulus on steroids
“And there is absolutely no question in my mind that the Inflation Reduction Act, should it pass, noting that I am recording this before we know whether it will or not for sure, will be the same, but on steroids.”
Kann: The US will not build much more pumped hydro storage
“Well much as I love pumped hydro storage I just realistically don't think we're gonna add a whole lot more of it, certainly here in the U.S., so I'm not gonna put any of my money into that solution, though it is probably the most mature and maybe the cheapest,…”
Kann: Zero-carbon hydrogen will get cheaper sooner than expected
“I also think that it is going to be cheaper, clean hydrogen, zero C hydrogen is going to be cheaper sooner than people generally appreciate.”
Kann: Synthetic e-fuels may win long-term if input and process costs drop
“It's more of a cost problem, because as it stands today, basically, like, both input costs, hydrogen and CO₂, are too high, and then the process costs, turning those things into e-fuels, are too high. So you've got to solve for all three of those things and sc…”
Kann: Bitcoin will ultimately resemble data centers for electricity demand
“I think it's going to be like data centers probably ultimately, which means like significant source of electricity load that from a climate perspective is neither good nor bad basically.”
Kann: Batteries must grow 2x-3x faster than solar to reach equilibrium
“The implication to me is that batteries should be growing at roughly two to three times the rate that solar should to play catch up here. And so we have this, you know, we started off with this, like, very bullish solars meeting the vast majority of new, like,…”
Data centers will install large-scale behind-the-meter battery storage systems
“We're going to put a lot of batteries behind the meter at data centers. Like, I'm pretty convinced that that's going to happen.”
Kann: Grid constraints make sub-uptime off-grid data centers inevitable
“In a world where we're so constrained, on the grid side, it seems inevitable to be that that is going to happen to some degree, and that the engineering challenge is going to get at least partially solved.”
Kann predicts Hawley's bill mandating off-grid data centers will not pass
“Josh Hawley in the Senate and somebody else, I think introduced a bill that would essentially mandate data centers to go off grid. I, my presumption is that doesn't pass.”
Kann: Data centers will soon rise in global electricity demand growth rankings
“Data centers are gonna, I mean, even, even on a global basis, I think they're gonna move up this ranking before too long.”
Apple is the most likely company to move AI inference on-device
“It's not hard to picture that, like, if somebody's gonna move a lot of this inference on device, it's gonna be Apple.”
Kann: Large industrial power consumers face higher costs and difficult siting
“If you're a large industrial electricity load and you want to site a new plant, you are way at the back of the queue right now. One, you're going to pay more, and two, siting is going to get really, really hard.”
Kann: Energy efficiency tech will make a roaring venture comeback
“We don't really talk about energy efficiency that much anymore, at least in like, you know, venture climate techie circles.
But I think it might make a roaring comeback, actually, because rates are going to cause bills to become really painful for customers.”
Kann: Macro conditions will create a new category of DER startups
“I think that the macro is so favorable now.
To various types of DERs, be it demand flexibility, be it behind the meter generation, be it storage, you know, whatever it is there's gonna be a, like a, an entirely new category of companies that get created and in…”