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 665 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
Jenkins: Europe can viably eliminate 100% of Russian gas by winter 2022
“Europe's current plan is to cut natural gas use by about two thirds before this winter.
Can they actually go a hundred percent?
Can they cut if they needed to, or if they needed to make a credible threat on the global stage to Putin that we will cut our gas us…”
Tillis predicts utility rates will spike due to Biden retiring generation assets
“And now that the demand's going up, if we can't get these projects back online, I do want people to understand why some of these rates have spiked, and they will have spiked because this administration decided to take those generation assets offline.”
Sridhar: AI revolution cannot be powered without natural gas
“And without natural gas, we are not going to be able to power the AI revolution. That's a fact.”
Behind-the-meter nuclear data centers have no credible case for decades
“I don't think there's a credible argument for behind the meter nuclear at a data center in the near future. And by near future, I mean, The next couple of decades.”
Huang: Nissan and Mitsubishi might not exist in 10 years
“Like, who knows? In 10 years, there might not be a Nissan out there. There might not be a Mitsubishi.”
Faruqi: Utilities that fail to update rate structures will go bankrupt
“And if they don't change those utilities that don't change them, they'll go bankrupt.”
Shah: Existing grid capacity can handle load growth through 2034–2035
“The amount of load growth that we can handle, within the actual system that we've already paid for is gargantuan. It can easily take us through probably 2034, 20 35, right? Which, by which time we think nuclear will be more cost effective, enhanced geothermal …”
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,…”
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.”
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: Electricity rates will rise for most people in coming years
“Data centers are absolutely going to be pushing up rates, and other factors, right, in the supply chain. Rates are going up for most people in most places, I think, in the years to come.”
Janous: US data center constraints will persist through 2030 and beyond
“All the stuff we thought we were going to build in this country, or thought we could build, a lot of that's not going to get built, because of all the things we've just been talking about. Like, I think that, and this problem is going to persist for the forese…”
Janous: Vast majority of computation will remain in 100MW+ data centers
“I still believe that the vast majority of the computation is going to be done in large data centers. Large being defined as hundred megawatts or more in my world.”
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.”
Quantum advantage over classical systems is three to four years away
“As quantum computing capability follows the trajectory that most people believe it's on, we're about three to four years away from the rolling out of systems that will be able to have performance gains that will lead any scientist or engineer or researcher to …”
Quantum algorithms are a bigger ten-year hurdle than hardware
“The algorithmic issue right now is probably the greater hill to climb in terms of general applicability of quantum systems in the next decade.”
Eliahu-Ontiveros: Massive AI data center campuses will concentrate in West Texas
“I think the way big data centers, big data center campuses are going to look like a few years from now, again, like, obviously the scenario is we keep adding tens of gigawatts per year that keeps growing, so, you know, we're in this AI scenario. I'm, you know,…”
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: 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- …”
Lubershane: Multi-year data center growth will force large-scale off-grid power adoption
“And if this data center boom continues for longer than the next three to five years, if it's really a robust trend that is gonna, you know, be, Decade plus, you know, for the foreseeable future, then I don't see any other option besides going to something like…”
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…”
Fulgham: Structural fossil generation declines in India will happen closer to 2030
“But we do expect that it will still take a few more years for that trend to really be structural. So it'll be closer to 2030, where we'll be seeing normal years of demand growth and falls in fossil generation at the same time in India.”
Fulgham: China faces significant coal generator overcapacity for years
“China is very much moving into an, into a time where they will, for most of the year, there will be significant overcapacity of coal coal generators as well. So yeah, a big change in the role that China is using coal. And that will be a feature for years to co…”
Fulgham: India may meet all new power demand with clean energy by 2030–2035
“Where we could even see as soon as 2030, that structural point where all of the new demand is already met by clean power sources. And that means that not just fossil generation, but also coal generation would not need to grow beyond that. Now it might not be e…”
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…”
Panthalassa expects lower AI chip failure rates at sea than on land
“In many cases, we believe that the reliability of the chips, the failure rates will actually be lower on our platform because we can provide much colder cooling temperatures than is typical on land, and we have no oxygen. We eliminate the oxygen from the paylo…”
Bulk of AI energy consumption will power long-running background processes
“There's a whole class of like super latency sensitive applications where you wouldn't want to use us. But that's not where the bulk of energy will be going. The bulk of energy will be going to very long running processes that are churning, churning, churning t…”
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”
Linville: European fertilizer production may never return to 100% capacity
“And unfortunately at this point in time, we're sitting in 20, 26. I don't know that we will ever see a hundred percent in Europe again.”
Vahdat: AI footprint will favor many medium data centers over gigawatt hubs
“It'll really come down to geographic locality and probably a medium number of medium-sized data centers. Sorry for the whatever lack of precision there, but medium number of medium-sized data centers augmented with a small number of large data centers.”
AI token costs will asymptotically approach the fundamental cost of power
“I think the answer will increasingly become yes in the future as the cost of inference, the cost of token generation asymptotically approaches the cost of power, which is the only real operational expense input into the Into the cost of intelligence generation…”
Nolan: Advanced reactors will surprise on deployment speed for AI demand
“We think that they're going to surprise everyone in their deployment speed and scale up, and, you know, just looking at the landscape of energy demand in the U.S. We haven't grown the grid for decades and yet now we have this huge surge of demand for data cent…”
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.”
Elder: Substantial AI model training will happen in space within 30 years
“In 20 years or 30 years, there's gonna be a lot of AI models being trained in particular in space”
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.”
Baglino: Solid-State Transformers Will Replace Passive Ones
“I believe that solid-stage transformers are going to replace passive ones.”
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”
Most nuclear developers will miss DOE's July 2026 criticality milestone
“I don't think a lot of reactors really are on pace for that July fourth milestone because it's an extremely aggressive milestone, and I think it's a little unfair to the nuclear industry actually to sort of set these very aggressive milestones when the reality…”
McGinnis: Rising electric bills will drive mass adoption of DIY plug-in energy
“The more that we see bills go up in the U.S., regardless of what the rules out there are, people are gonna go on Amazon, they're gonna start buying the stuff, they're gonna start plugging it in, and so I think this is coming one way or another, and it's really…”
Bullard: Texas electricity demand will land closer to ERCOT's lower 2030 forecast
“The true number is,
Either somewhere in between or much closer to ERCOT's figure.
I mean, ERCOT has the reason for demand, supply balancing, and upkeep, and everything else to get it really, really accurate in energy terms.
But the transmission service prov…”
Siting distributed edge compute will become easier than 1GW data centers
“I think finding capacity there may eventually become easier than finding the next thousand megawatts.”
Modon: Unlimited completes 100% of engineering upfront before committing to price
“We've been able to not only Kind of like remove all that extra risk by taking the definition instead of, you know, doing that at 30%, we can take that definition all the way through a hundred percent.”
Lubershain: The nuclear industry cannot sustain a Cambrian explosion of reactor designs
“There just can't be a Cambrian explosion of new reactors. The, Industrial logic of the nuclear industry just doesn't lend itself to that. I think best case scenario, it's bad for the industry if you end up with, you know, four or five competing reactor designs…”