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 2,090 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 24 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
Hertz-Shargel: Bitcoin mining raises Texas power bills by $1.8B annually
“So collectively, it's 1.8 billion conservatively per year. And that's sort of a run rate, I would say. And that represents around a five percent increase in costs of Texans, of, you know non-Bitcoin mining consumers. And that, that's across all the different s…”
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.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Anthropic aims to add over 8 GW of power by 2027
“Anthropic, you know, one and a half gigs of capacity end of 20, 25. By 27, they won over 10 gigs, right? So they're going to build basically more than eight gigawatts in two years. That's the size of Google today.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Google deployed $50B in balance sheet backstops for Anthropic
“If you look at how much capital they have sort of indirectly deployed, it's already fifty billion dollars of sort of applications that they have on their balance sheets that are solely in sort of the goal of supporting Anthropix data center build out.”
Friedmann: Gas with carbon capture beats nuclear cold in many markets
“In many markets, that's competitive with wind, solar, and batteries. In many markets, that just beats nuclear cold.”
Baglino: Nuclear capital cost per kilowatt exceeds highly curtailed renewables
“When you look at the capital cost per kilowatt of nuclear with everything that is known today, it's much more expensive than even highly curtailed renewables.”
Cabiyo: Enviva turns whole, lumber-grade saw logs into wood pellets for export
“I have a colleague that has toured their facilities in the past and saw that they were pulling whole saw logs, which is, like, stuff you would turn into lumber, like, two-by-fours, pulling saw logs and turning it into pellets to be burned in the UK or elsewher…”
Fury: Forestry projects frequently claim credits for pre-funded government plantings
“Maybe your, maybe the field report was in China, and the Chinese government paid us fully to do that project as part of its, like, regional reforestation initiatives five years before the project even started, right? So, and this is, like, not a theoretical ex…”
Carbon auditor approved dead mangrove project because specific sample plots survived
“And we've seen that, for example, in a mangrove project where we were asking the auditor who's doing the verification, the MRV, hey, you know, what was going on in the project? We knew that most of the mangroves were dead, right? So, and they were like saying,…”
WattTime finds 85% of Bitcoin mining load is powered by fossil fuels
“And so Watt Time, that is the general methodology that they use. They found that 85% of incremental load from Bitcoin mining comes from coal and natural gas plants.”
Song: Make Sunsets received FAA clearance and a NOTAM for balloon launch
“So we got, got clearance by the FAA. Like, we just got issued a NOTAM.”
Kugelmass: Global SMR sector is entirely PR, with zero physical construction
“Well, there's virtually nothing actually being built globally anywhere for anything other than the traditional reactors. There's a lot of press announcements. Our company is building stuff, but we can get to that later. And then everything else is very theoret…”
Kugelmass: NuScale's NRC certificate is for a deprecated design they discarded
“The things that they got the certificate for are deprecated designs. So no, they don't have like, yeah, like everything that you're seeing is for something they submitted years and years and years ago, and they've totally thrown in the trash at this point also…”
Kugelmass: Any NRC administrative assistant can trigger a two-year project shutdown
“Like, any single person, you could be an administrative assistant at the NRC, at any point can raise a safety flag on any project and shut that project down for two years. This could be someone with no technical training whatsoever. If they come across a piece…”
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.”
Lubershain: Most utility service territories have no spare grid capacity left
“In most utility service territories, it's not the case that there's a lot of headroom left on the grid. There's no more headroom left in the grid. There's no more spare capacity in most places, which means that oftentimes you will have to build new power gener…”
Lubershain: EPRI found data centers already slightly lower average customer bills
“And when you do control for other variables that might bias the analysis Epri found that basically, on average, data centers are lowering customer bills a little bit already. So we are seeing, it's not a major impact, it's something like six percent, but data …”
Wang: Voya achieves direct fully delivered cost parity with diesel
“With U.S. Scrap, you're already at diesel parity when it comes to fuel costs. Which is a critical thing for us. We're not commanding a green premium or any other sort of premium. Direct cost parity with diesel for fully delivered cost, including all the proces…”
Wong: ThinkLabs cuts nine-month grid interconnection studies to under 10 minutes
“So studies that would take previously nine months, right, as I mentioned, interconnection studies, now it takes us only a matter of a couple of minutes, like 10 minutes or less.”
Tillis cast the lone Senate vote proposing a state AI regulation moratorium
“I was one against 99 in a vote on the Senate floor last year to place a moratorium on state-level AI regulations until we figured out a national framework.”
Tillis claims the federal government holds equity in ten public corporations
“We're at this place now where we've got equity stocks and 10 or so publicly traded corporations, a golden share that lets us veto board procedures for U.S. Steel.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Meta modern AI data centers omit backup generator sets
“Another interesting thing they've done, for example, is more at the data center level than at the energy level, but no backup. You look at any one of the modern meta data, so they don't have any gensets, or they have, you know, like, 10 megawatts for a hundred…”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Reliable developers are planning 5 GW data centers in West Texas
“I know of very reliable developers now that are planning five gigawatt data centers in West Texas. So I think it's really changing. We're at an inflection point, and I think you're going to see some pretty gigantic announcements.”
Yedvab: Background stratospheric levels make small-scale sulfate testing impossible
“One of the problems with sulfates, apart from what we've been discussing, is the fact that you cannot do testing at small scale of sulfates. And the reason for this, since this is something sometimes people overlook, is the very high background that you have c…”
Yedvab: Stardust lab tests show its particle is highly chemically inert
“Lab tests that we've done show that our particle is, I'd say, at a very high level of inertness, but definitely better than any other alternative that it was provided so far.”
Yedvab: Stardust developed tagging technology to track particle batches globally
“We have developed a unique tagging technology which enables us to track in real time each batch of particles as they move across the globe.”
Yedvab: 0.5 degrees of cooling costs $10 billion using Stardust particles
“So in, in terms of giving orders of magnitude or estimates, and we have a very detailed breakdown for every million tons of particles that will be Dispersed, the cost will be roughly ten billion dollars, and you'll get half a degree of cooling.”
Yedvab: Halting global warming would cost $20 billion annually using Stardust
“Essentially at current level to stop war, to stabilize temperature, to stop warming at the current level, and again, the level is changing all the time, but essentially you'll need Well, let's say you'd say two million tons of our particles, just to give you- …”
China has enough capacity to meet half of global car demand
“China has enough capacity today to supply half the world's demand for cars, and it's not out of the question that one day China could be Capable of producing all the cars for everybody in the world.”
The US is essentially the only nation effectively blocking Chinese cars
“So we are basically more or less the only nation in the world that effectively blocks Chinese cars.”
Chinese AV makers are commercializing faster globally than their US rivals
“The U.S. Leads in technological innovation, but China, once again, is quicker when it comes to commercialization. Not only inside China, but we're seeing the Chinese autonomous vehicle makers move into the Middle East, and in the U.K. And Germany now, moving q…”
Panthalassa wave data centers achieve 99.8 percent availability with minimal batteries
“In all of our optimizations, we can be achieving for payloads, you know, we can be achieving with very little battery, like, 99.5, 99.8% power availability with far less battery than you would need for an equivalent solar installation, for example.”
Panthalassa designs deliver wave power at 3.5 to 4 cents per kWh
“We have designs that are two cent per kilowatt hour, On the power. And we, the optimum tends to be, you know, given everything I was just describing, the optimum tends to be in the four cent, three and a half to four cent per kilowatt hour range. But keep in m…”
AI reinforcement learning energy demand probably already exceeds traditional pre-training
“And this is an area that is becoming huge in terms of energy demand. It'll, it will, The probably already is bigger than what we have historically considered training, you know, pre-training”
Cohen: No regular driverless highway trucking service operates today
“There's not a regular driverless service for trucking on highway that exists today. And that's 10 years after we've really put serious effort into the space.”
Hershman: 85% of solar labor is mechanical, not skilled electrical
“If you think about a solar project,
You know, probably 85 to 90% of that is really, you know, labor and mechanical labor, right?
You are, we're putting posts in the ground, we're bolting together racking systems, and we're installing modules.
And then, you kno…”
Shafer: TerraPower and Oklo sodium fast reactors will require waste conditioning
“Any of the sodium fast reactor designs, so your TerraPower, your Oklo, things of this nature, this would be A conversation where you need to have, at a minimum, a waste conditioning component to this, and if you're a company like Oklo, that's very much thinkin…”
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…”
Elder: Early off-grid data center projects fail to maintain 90% uptime
“When we, we've heard some of the early data from some of the off-grid projects that have been built so far, the ANIC data suggests they're not able to stay above even 90% uptime yet.”
Elder: A 4-square-kilometer orbital data center would sustain hourly debris strikes
“If you scale that up to a single floating thing that's four kilometers, four square kilometers large, you can basically expect to have a piece of space debris hitting that you know, data center every hour.”
Roberts: A rogue actor could test solar geoengineering cheaply and go undetected
“You could stand up and do a reasonably large scale test on your own without a ton of money, arguably without being detected doing so by the world.”
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.”
Baglino: SSTs eliminate 70% of data center electrical components and footprint
“And you can remove 70% of the stuff in the in the electrical diagram and a similar amount of footprint”
Baglino: Solid-state transformers can match traditional transformer costs while adding grid functions
“An SST can have a cost similar to a traditional oil-filled transformer but at the same time provide functions that would be That would be provided by popcorn components around the transformer. Functions like overcurrent protection, fault isolation, what an aut…”
NRC rejected Oklo's application over safety and accident information gaps
“So, the thing that NRC denied for Oklo was that they submitted a combined license application, so this is for that parallel step where you don't do a separate design certification, you sort of submit a combined operating license and construction permit applica…”
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 …”
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…”