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 1,873 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
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: 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…”
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: 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…”
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…”
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.”
Lipman: Most lab-grown meat startups will fail to reach commercial scale
“I'm anticipating that the vast majority will not be able to reach commercial scale and not be able to reach the market, so we'll either see a bunch of consolidation or a bunch of dead companies in the wake of whatever reckoning may be coming.”
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 …”
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: Nvidia balance sheet support will unlock neocloud growth in 2H 2026
“I expect, you know, second half of 20 seconds, you'll see NeoCloud sort of growth be unlocked much more through the actions of NVIDIA as they provide their volunteer support.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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: 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.”
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…”
Black: Fission, fusion, and fracking were all invented in New Mexico
“Fission, fusion, and fracking were all invented in New Mexico.”
Garabedian: Western green hydrogen plant capital costs doubled to over $3/W
“We've seen those capital costs go from You know, an early promise of something like 1500 dollars a kilowatt, buck 50 a watt, to now even over three dollars a watt of capital cost.”
Sridhar: Data centers will shift to 800-volt DC architecture
“The second pain point that they are working on as we speak is shifting the mindset to an 800 volt DC bus going into Iraq. Let me explain this to you. When you are a large power plant that produces 50 megawatts, 500 megawatts worth of power, because so much pow…”
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…”
Dell: Base Power offers 25 kWh home battery backup for $19 monthly
“When you sign up with base, you get a 25 or 50, if you offer two kilowatt hour system on your home, that is all yours to use when the grid goes out for 19 dollars a month for the 25 kilowatt hour system and 29 dollars a month for the 50 kilowatt hour system. S…”
Solar and batteries have killed Texas's $9,000 per megawatt-hour price spikes
“The only argument, you know, you ever had for building something like a baseload generator in Texas is that sometimes the price would go to 5000 or 9000 dollars a megawatt hour, but with the massive amounts of solar and storage coming out of the grid, which yo…”
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.”
Piper: PJM accredits 100MW of solar as just 8 to 10MW
“If you bring a hundred megawatts of gas generation, we count that as about 70 megawatts of reserve contribution. If you bring a hundred megawatts of solar, we may count that as eight to 10 megawatts of reserve contribution. You know, very, very conservative, m…”
Lubershain: Ford is moving ahead with $3B Michigan CATL-licensed plant
“Ford has basically said, we're moving ahead with this three billion dollar battery plant in Michigan, where they're licensing lithium iron phosphate technology from CATL, the Chinese battery giant.”
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…”
Smit: Trump deep-sea mining order covers international and foreign waters
“And I think the other important thing about the executive order is that it has stipulated that it's not just US territorial waters. This is international waters as well as other exclusive zones.”
Smit: Land-based mines require 4x to 8x the tonnage of seabed nodules
“The other thing to consider is that we are bringing up one ton of material, and in that one ton of material, we are producing the same amount of metal
As you would need to have anywhere between three and five land-based mines. So for them to get the same amoun…”
Brown: VPPs cost 40% of utility-scale battery installations
“And it would be, and the VPP would also be 40% of the cost of a utility scale battery investment.”
Brown: VPPs cost 60% of natural gas peakers or less
“We believe that a VPP similar capacity resource would be 60% of the cost of a natural gas peaker investment. And honestly, that's probably outdated because now we know that natural building natural gas peakers are even more expensive.”
Friedmann: New gas with full CCS costs $70–$100/MWh in the US
“In the U.S., assuming three dollars per million BTU for natural gas, on a new build, All costs. That means cost of capture, compression, transportation, storage, and permitting. You're looking at 70 to a hundred dollars a megawatt hour.”
Friedmann: Secretary Wright is proposing cuts to Congressionally approved clean energy programs
“We are seeing Secretary Wright propose a set of cuts to programs that were approved by Congress and approved by the prior DOE. In some cases, Congress, I mean the contracts have already been made, and this is part of the broader rescission around clean energy.…”
Friedmann: Congress is highly likely to preserve 45Q and 45V tax credits
“With respect to Forty-five-Q and other tax credits in the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act I give high odds That they will sustain, 45 Q, 45 V related projects.”
Stadler: Microgrid power costs reach 3-4¢/kWh including capex over 20 years
“We really get down to three, four cents, including all the capital that we installed there, and we model actually escalation on the electricity side by 10% every year, and natural gas also going up by five percent every year. But still, at the end of the analy…”