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 82 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 82 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
Needham: CFS will demonstrate commercial net energy gain by 2027
“We're building a plant just about an hour west of here that in 2027 will show net energy gain in a commercially relevant architecture.”
Dennett: 2024-2050 copper demand will exceed all historical production combined
“We need more copper between now and twenty-fifty than in the history of human civilization. That includes the Bronze Age.”
Supercool Earth extracts more water from clouds than silver iodide
“And what we bring, as opposed to silver iodide, is that we can target more clouds and essentially bring, get more rain than silver iodide can currently today. So we can target more geographies, more warmer clouds, more seasonalities, and then at that same temp…”
Dutta: Harbinger will reach ICE cost parity without subsidies by 2026
“And Harbinger by next year will be at cost parity with ICE trucks without any tax credits.”
Needham: First commercial CFS fusion plant will launch in early 2030s
“Early 20 thirties. That means probably within a few, not 2030, but probably within a few years of 2030.”
Only one company is delivering a 100MW firm clean project in 2026
“There is one company that's building a hundred megawatt firm clean energy project that's going to be delivered in twenty-twenty-six, and that's a geothermal company.”
Shah: Trump's DOE will honor all closed and obligated LPO loans
“But like, for closed loans and loans that have obligated funds, I think they'll honor all those loans.”
Shah: Annual electricity load growth will likely be around 2.5%, not 7%
“I don't think we're going to have seven percent load growth every year. I think it's probably more like two and a half percent, but it's still something that we don't have the tools to deal with right now.”
Orthofer: Max 30% of abatement needs commercially viable by late 2030s
“Despite sort of huge cost down historically and projected, we will not get to more than 20 or 30% of all abatement needs being sort of fully in the money or fully sort of commercially mature by the end of the 20 thirties, which I guess is a rather, was for me …”
Orthofer: Green hydrogen cost parity delayed 5 to 8 years past 2030
“If I look back at our forecast from 20 20, for when we would achieve cost parity between green hydrogen and grey hydrogen, we said this would be by the end of this decade. I think by now we've moved that out by five to eight years, depending on geography, just…”
Belizaire: Batch computing will quickly consume more energy than real-time compute
“If you look at the whole pie of the types of compute that's out there the batchable portion is growing faster than the rest, and it's become, it will quickly become a larger portion of the over, overall pie, and it will quickly have more energy demands than th…”
O'Donnell: Heat battery grid carbon savings double project-site savings
“And those grid effects of causing more renewables to show up that the heat battery is not using all those megawatt hours mean that the total system carbon savings are approximately twice the savings at the project site.”
O'Donnell: Intermittent renewable power will economically eclipse fossil fuels globally by 2030
“By 20 30 in most of the industrialized world, the conditions that exist in the six European countries where we're developing projects now in Australia and the half dozen US states, those market conditions exist in most of the industrialized world that you can …”
Cotton: Recycled lithium content will reach 80% to 90% in decades
“More and more recycling infrastructure gets built. We get closer and closer and migrate from that less than one percent to 80 to 90%, just like what lead has shown us. And it's really only a couple decades of recycling, so it'll happen fairly quickly.”
Kra: Commercial grid fusion will not arrive before 2035 to 2040
“In twenty-thirty-five and twenty-forty, we're probably going to see some there in that range. We might see a first commercial reactor producing electrons onto the grid, but I think before that, it's all going to be, if we do well, it's going to be pilots and d…”
Davis: Solar will make up 40% of US generating capacity by 2050
“According to our outlooks, by twenty-fifty, 40% of the generating capacity, just like electricity generating capacity in, in the U.S. Will be solar.”
Green hydrogen will become cheaper than blue hydrogen by 2030
“If we scaled it up to potentially hundreds of gigawatts by the end of the decade and going further, we expect the cost of that equipment to decline by 50, 60, or 70% or so, which really drives cost reductions of Green or renewable hydrogen below the cost of pr…”
Hydrogen electrolyzers could consume one-third of global power by 2050
“By twenty-fifty, under a net zero scenario, electrolyzers producing hydrogen take up a third of all electricity demand almost, just to power power themselves to produce hydrogen. So all of global, a third of all global electricity demand.”
Naam: Solar electricity costs will drop 4x by reaching one-third global generation
“So my personal forecast is the cost of solar electricity will drop by another factor of four. By the time electricity is, by the time solar is about a third of all electricity generation on Earth.”
Naam: IRA spending will reach trillions due to uncapped subsidies
“It's not four and fifty billion dollars of federal spending a year. It's like trillions. Because the IRA is not a pool of money. It's a per unit subsidy. And forecasters always do what? On unit forecasts, they always underestimate it, right? So the actual size…”
Naam: Total fossil fuel use and emissions will peak by 2030
“And I think we'll have peak total fossil fuels and peak emissions sometime later in this decade, ah, towards 2030.”
Morris: Edge assets will reach 30-50% of grid capacity within 10 years
“And if you look at all of those assets, so all of these small scale assets, Those are really going to be the future of how we balance the grid in the next 10 years. They're going to account for anywhere between, like, 30 and 50% of total system capacity.”
Shah: US will produce 10 million tons of clean hydrogen by 2030
“So I believe that by 2030, we will have ten million tons of clean hydrogen in this country.”
Panama Bartholomy: California Will Ban Gas Appliances Within Seven Years
“California's gonna be banning this stuff in seven years, so start the transition now when there's a lot of money and incentives going.”
Atwood: Green hydrogen could be the cheapest steelmaking method by 2050
“The simplest way to put it is that we think by twenty-fifty, making steel with hydrogen could be the cheapest way to do it.”
Kimber: Five clean energy sectors will become multi-hundred-billion industries
“So, you know, those five industries are what we've identified as, you know, the areas where we think there is inevitable growth in the sort of hundreds of billions of dollars. These are industries that could easily be some of the largest industries that our pl…”
Kimber: Direct air capture costs will drop to $100-$200 per ton
“There are plenty of them out there at industrial scales that will definitely get down into the, you know, 102 hundred dollar, you know, a ton kind of level, at which point capture becomes your backstop technology, if you will, and it will set the price point a…”
Pinkowski: Hormuz closure will push 45M more people into food insecurity
“And because of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, it is estimated that over the next year, an additional forty-five million more people around the world are going to go into food insecurity.”
Paruri: Tandem PV delivers 30% efficiency boost over silicon, 50% over CdTe
“When you think about our technology compared to silicon, it's like a 30% improvement. When you think about it in compared to cad tell, it's a 50% improvement.”
US federal ban on cloud seeding is highly unlikely
“I think that a blanket federal mandate to ban cloud seeding or weather mod is highly unlikely.”
Sage's subsurface pressure technology can store energy for weeks or months
“So yes, we can literally store the water for weeks, if not months you know, and we would just monitor the pressure depending on the formation permeability. We may have to have water added occasionally to keep the pressure up, but in some formations, like I sai…”
Boston Metal aims to unlock commercial steel applications by 2029
“If you know, if we don't find non-dilutive funds earlier, that cell will be running in twenty-twenty-eight, which will then unlock the commercial application of the technology for steel in 29, twenty-thirty.”
Carneiro: Boston Metal critical metals process cuts carbon footprint by 90%
“Ah, it is at the same time that, that we will have a carbon footprint that at one 10th of the incumbents today.”
Carneiro: Boston Metal produces 2x to 3x more metal per ore volume
“The same amount of ore you can produce twice or three times the amount of metal because our process is more efficient.”
Needham: SPARC reactor targets 100MW thermal power with 10x energy gain
“That'll produce about a hundred megawatts of thermal power. So a lot like 500 to a thousand times what the national ignition facility did, like a substantial amount of power. And his design point is actually a gain of like 10, so 10 times, actually it's 11 mor…”
Palmer: Terawatt Will Require Multiple Billion-Dollar Raises to Build EV Network
“The billion dollars is not gonna last that long to build that many assets, and so it was really the vision from the beginning that this is not just a small-scale effort, it's going to be something that requires significant capital, and they'll have to be multi…”
Hamilton: Supreme Court precedent will compel disbursement of obligated IRA funds
“I do think that the funds that are obligated will be dispersed. I'm like, I just don't think that they can legally. The Supreme Court, I don't think, will allow that to happen, so I consider that, like, a lower risk for the funds that have been obligated.”
Shah: Over 200 GW of U.S. coal will retire within 15 years
“We're, you know, going to be taking offline over 200 gigawatts of coal over the next, you know, 15 years, just mainly because it's at the end of life.”
Hurlbut: US will definitely miss 2030 climate goals under Trump
“You know, the executive power that Trump would have if he was president, we would definitely not be hitting those goals because he would affect the executive branch in a major way.”
O'Donnell: Heat batteries unlock up to 1.9 times their capacity in renewables
“Jesse Jenkins has, is publishing a paper shortly exploring that. His paper findings really excited us because he found that in looking at systems that he modeled in the east, eastern side of the U.S., for every megawatt of heat batteries that show up in the sy…”
Cotton: Global Battery Recycling Market Will Reach $25 Billion by 2030
“And if you look at the global lithium battery recycling market, it's already today roughly a five billion dollar industry, And we expect it to grow by about five-fold just in the coming few years to the end of the decade to nearly twenty-five billion dollars.”
Downing: US electric grid must serve 200 GW of new peak demand
“Well, we have the need to serve 200 gigawatts of new peak demand between now and 2030.”
EV adoption will heavily shift grid cost-to-serve to local distribution
“There's two hundred eighty million cars in the country. There's a hundred and twenty million households. We designed a century old grid around those hundred twenty million households, and now as all these cars start going electric, there's just going to be a t…”
US industrial emissions will surpass power and transport by 2035
“The industrial sector is set to overtake power generation and transportation as the biggest source of planet warming emissions in the U.S. By twenty-thirty-five.”
Naam: Global meat consumption will not decrease and will keep rising
“Like, forget about reducing meat consumption. It ain't going to happen. Meat consumption is going to keep going like this and this.”