Shalini Ramanathan
Director of Origination, Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners · 4 appearances on the record.
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Ramanathan specializes in clean energy commercial origination and offtake agreements, negotiating power purchase agreements with corporate buyers including Google, Microsoft, and General Motors. She previously served as Senior Vice President of Origination at Renewable Energy Systems Americas and worked with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and CAMCO.
23statements → 14claims → 7claims resolved → 86%fully supported → 3.48/5average certainty → 2.26/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
6 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 6 not checkable as stated how the 14 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 predictions · 9 assertions · 3 opinions · 6 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 14 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Shalini argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Their most notable contradicted claim
Ramanathan: Average AI usage carries the environmental impact of five cars
“Average use of AI, so not like building deep fakes, but just like, you know drafting emails, that kind of thing that I, you know, I think everyone will be doing soon enough. That kind of average use has because of the computing demand involved, has the environ…”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Shalini Ramanathan on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Shalini Ramanathan said on the Green Blueprint that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Ramanathan: Wind and solar returns cannot match oil and gas returns
“Wind and solar are becoming commodities where the returns are not anything like what you get in oil and gas.”
Ramanathan: Traditional project finance models cannot scale to triple renewables
“And it strikes me that we're not going to triple, you know, the renewed installed renewables using this model. I think we need something radically different, and it's exciting to think about what that might look like.”
Ramanathan: Average AI usage carries the environmental impact of five cars
“Average use of AI, so not like building deep fakes, but just like, you know drafting emails, that kind of thing that I, you know, I think everyone will be doing soon enough. That kind of average use has because of the computing demand involved, has the environ…”
Ramanathan: BYD overtook Tesla as the world's top EV seller in 2023
“They became at the end of last year, the leading seller of EVs. They edged out Tesla last year for that title”
Ramanathan: Cleantech SPAC growth projections were not backed by performance
“I think the SPAC market especially, I think a lot of companies that use that you know, that pathway to IPO-ing, they really had massive growth stories, and that wasn't underpinned by actual performance or by the technology curve and where they were on it.”
Ramanathan: Electric vehicles make hydrogen passenger cars permanently obsolete
“So Shell announced that it's permanently closing six of its seven hydrogen refueling stations for passenger cars in California, and my forecast is that maybe this is, I hope the end of trying to make hydrogen-powered passenger cars happen, because EVs are simp…”
Ramanathan: Commercializing new energy technologies is as hard as wind and solar
“Commercializing technology, implementing projects to, you know, to get it out there, that's going to be As hard for any new technology as it has been for wind and solar. So, you know, might as well try to solve it for wind and solar.”
Ramanathan: Ongoing Transformer Shortage Continues to Delay Energy Projects
“Because there's a huge shortage of transformers, and it hasn't been a short-term thing. It hasn't been just the COVID years. You know, it continues to be Something that you know, can really affect the timing of projects.”
Ramanathan: Prevailing wage mandates create tension with low-cost green power
“Because if you want really low-cost green power you know, creating jobs with prevailing wages and having apprenticeship programs, you know, there's some tension with that.”
Ramanathan: Heavy industries like steel require green hydrogen instead of direct electrification
“There are some things that you can't directly electrify, and, you know, steel, cement, there are these Hard to abate sectors, and I think that green hydrogen, we're going to need a molecule, you know, it's probably not going to be an electron, it'll be a molec…”
Ramanathan: Low-cost power and IRA incentives make U.S. clean manufacturing unbeatable
“The U.S. Now has two advantages. It has, on the whole, on a global basis, low-cost green power, and it has the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act. And that means that it's going to be really hard to beat the U.S. As a location for manufacturing.”
Ramanathan: Global warming is very likely to exceed the 1.5°C threshold
“We're not on track to keep average temperature 1.5 degrees Celsius below pre-industrial levels. That's the threshold that we've been talking about for a long time, and we're very likely to exceed it perhaps, you know, perhaps by a lot.”
Ramanathan: Grid may revert to polluting fuels if clean energy isn't accessible
“If the demand isn't met with clean energy, and if it isn't reasonably easy to meet it with clean energy I do worry that, you know, we'll revert to more polluting, a more polluting fuel stack just because it's easier to do”
Ramanathan: IRA Hydrogen Incentives Target Supply Without Stimulating Demand
“There's been a lot of hype around it, and the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are supply-side. They are not stimulating demand.”
Ramanathan: IRA subsidizes hydrogen supply without creating demand or penalizing gray hydrogen
“One of the challenges is that the Inflation Reduction Act is supply-side policy. It reduces the price. It doesn't create demand. It doesn't say, you know, you're going to have to pay a penalty if you continue using gray hydrogen.”
Ramanathan: China refines 65% of global lithium supply
“So China refines 65% of the lithium worldwide, and it may come from other places. A lot of it comes from Australia, but it's refined in China, and that means that if there are trade tensions, they have control over something that is important to the U.S.”
Ramanathan: Much of global polysilicon is made in Xinjiang
“A lot of polysilicon is, right now, it's made in the Uyghur region of China. There are, you know, known human rights abuses, well-documented”
Ramanathan: Mature renewable industries built political support for U.S. industrial policy
“I think one of the advantages we have today is that we have more solar and wind and energy storage installed. You know, the industries are more mature, and I think that has caught, that has built the political support for industrial policy.”
Ramanathan: Google and data centers push for hourly 24/7 green power matching
“Many of them, you know, Google comes to mind, are really pushing for twenty-four-seven green power, which is to say that a given data center Every hour of power that it consumes off the grid, brown power, should be matched by green power.”
Ramanathan: Industrial facilities should mimic crypto miners as flexible interruptible loads
“I think one of the reasons that cryptocurrency is interesting is because it's interruptible load. And so, you know, the crypto mining facilities are happy to use your low-cost green power and then go offline when it makes more sense to sell that green power. A…”
Ramanathan: Clean manufacturing power projects in the Southeast will likely be solar
“If you're going to be you know, developing a project in the southeast you know, of the U.S., that is Probably going to be solar. There are only you know, really a handful of pockets of wind resource there.”
Ramanathan: Climate tech equity financing fell 34% year-over-year
“Equity financing down 34% and down also the year before that.”
Ramanathan: Expanding manufacturing will unlock new geographies for renewable power projects
“What's exciting about expanding the manufacturing base in the U.S. Is that you know, you now can perhaps site renewable power projects in locations that you couldn't before, because there was no economic activity there before, and you were taking the risk that…”
Appearances (4)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| A view of the $1.8 trillion clean energy economy | Feb 22, 2024 | 11m |
| US power demand is set to boom. How will we meet it? | Feb 1, 2024 | 15m |
| How to triple renewables by 2030 | Nov 29, 2023 | 20m |
| How will we power all those green factories? | May 22, 2023 | 11m |