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 25 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Dell: Elon Musk's greatest contribution is training engineers to build companies
“It's the most incredible contribution I think anyone has ever made to humanity. It's not just the company that he's built, but the engineers that he's trained that have gone on to build other great companies. It's like I said, he's the greatest technologist of…”
Dell: US electricity demand CAGR will jump 5x to 10%
“Over the last 20 years, electricity demand has gone at roughly a two percent compounded annual growth grade, and, you know, we think it'll go to, you know, somewhere on the order of 10%, which is obviously a five hex, which on a base as large as energy is real…”
Dell: Next 50 years of energy defined by solar, batteries, and software
“We think that there's a generational kind of paradigm shift happening in the energy industry, where the last five decades of energy were defined by coal and then Natural gas as the marginal megawatt. And the next five decades will be defined by solar batteries…”
Dell: AI will soon be the world's largest consumer of electricity
“And it's now the fastest growing and soon going to be the largest consumer of electricity in the world. And its name is AI.”
Dell: Utility-scale batteries face fundamental interconnection and transmission constraints
“They're fundamentally constrained really by two things. One is interconnection capacity, so there's not enough places on the grid to go put these big shipping containers, and the second is transmission congestion.”
Dell: Residential battery companies are focused on the wrong business model
“The distributed architecture is the answer. And all the companies that are around that problem, they're focused on the wrong business model. They're focused on high margin upfront sales.”
Dell: Regulated utilities have no incentive to innovate, only grow rate base
“There's no financial incentive for them to come with new technology. Their only financial incentive is to go increase the size of the rate base.”
Dell: Vertical integration is only important when competing on cost
“It's only important if you're playing a cost focused game, right? Like it's not vertical integration because it's fun or because it's cool. It's because we're trying to compete on cost. And vertical integration is a great strategy to win on cost, right? Electr…”
Dell: The lack of beloved energy brands creates massive counter-positioning opportunity
“There really aren't any beloved brands in energy, which makes the opportunity even bigger because it's counter positioned. It's unique, right? And so if you're able to do a thing that no one has ever done in your space, you stand out, right? And so being able …”
Dell: In year 30 Base Power will almost certainly make cells
“In year 30, it almost certainly will.”
Dell: Base plans to expand into generation, transmission, storage, and retail
“At a very high level, energy is four things. Make, move, store, and sell, right? You have to make it, generation, you have to move it, transmission, distribution, so you have to generate electricity, you have to move it to where it's made, store, battery stora…”
Zach Dell intends for Base Power to be his last company
“Ok, so this is your last company? Absolutely.”
Dell: Grid is massively oversized for peak demand, driving up costs
“The grid is a system by which the transmission distribution happens, and it's built for the peak, so it's massively oversized, which means that you have a bunch of inefficiency, and that it's not being used all the time. It's not being highly utilized, and whe…”
Dell: Base Power is building a 100-megawatt battery fleet for CoServe
“So for CoServe Electric, for example, we have built them or in the process of building them a hundred megawatt and soon to be expanded fleet of batteries that they use in the same way that we do in the deregulated markets.”
Dell: Base Power signs 10-year 'megawatts as a service' utility contracts
“The reg business is, we are a vendor to the utilities. We build in these battery fleets, and then we sign ten-year contracts with them, and they pay us for that fleet over time. It's megawatts as a service.”
Dell: Using distinct notebooks for tactical versus strategic work boosts focus
“Deliberately allocating time in the day towards working on the business versus in the business, it helps you and like actually physically having a different notebook that was like a different color. And I opened the black notebook and I'm like, it's time to ge…”
Dell: Base Power puts a physical turtle on the bottleneck employee's desk
“So the turtle is a literal physical turtle. Now there's actually a couple of them that goes on the desk of the person that is on critical path. That turtle can only be moved when critical path is resolved.”
Dell: Valor's Antonio Gracias focuses every board conversation solely on constraints
“The first year or two of working with Antonio, basically every conversation I had with him, and still to this day, this is, you know, the main focus of all of our conversations, every conversation was the same. Hey Antonio, how's it going? Good, how are you? W…”
Dell: Base Power co-founders never discuss good news in weekly strategy meetings
“Justin and I, every Sunday, you know, our one-on-ones are on Sundays, and we have these kind of strategy conversations on Sundays, and we don't ever talk about what's going well.”
Dell: Base Core battery is custom-designed and manufactured in-house
“It's called the base core, and it is our custom-built battery, and it is the output of the last three years of learning how to install, operate, and manage tens of thousands of distributed home batteries. It's completely designed by us from the ground up. It's…”
Dell: US electricity demand grew at inflation rate over 50 years
“Over the last 50 years, demand for electricity in the U.S. Has grown at basically the rate of inflation, so it has not really grown much.”
Dell: Poles move energy through space, batteries move it through time
“Poles and wires move energy through space, and batteries move energy through time.”
Dell: Base Power only optimizes existing power delivery via batteries
“So with our current product set today focused on battery storage, we're not making more electricity. We're just using it more efficiently to drive the cost down.”