Value chain · CLM-0387
In plain terms
Caltech's design is a different, much smaller thing from the UK, European and US flagship studies, so its numbers are kept separate rather than folded into the main size-twenty-to-thirty-five comparison. Its own three cost estimates are still useful, but mainly to show how much assumed future technology and launch-price improvement can move one paper's own numbers, not to compare directly against the bigger designs.
The claim as recorded
Caltech's CSSPS designs (76-181 MW average power) are excluded from the core FOAK institutional comparison (CLM-0379) because they are one to two orders of magnitude smaller in scale than the ~1.44-2 GW designs studied by Frazer-Nash and NASA, and no validated scaling law exists in the register to adjust for that difference (CLM-0383); Caltech's own three technology tiers (current/middle/asymptotic) are separately restated in CLM-0375 (low confidence) and should be read as a within-paper technology-development sensitivity, not as a fourth institutional data point directly comparable to the 2GW-class studies.
Evidence behind this: T0-ANALYSIS, so no CALC is owed: this record DERIVES NO NUMBER. It is a scoping decision - Caltech is excluded from the core comparison. Characterisation taken from synthesis/calcs.md's own disposition table, which sorted these records and recorded that they carry no arithmetic of their own. Method, stated here so a reader can dispute it: the judgement is made over the claims and calculations named in src, and rests on no quantity this record computes.
What it assumes
No assumptions are recorded against this claim.
Where it comes from
restate-lcoe.py trace, Section 6(ii) (core comparison excludes Caltech) and Section 4(e).
Basis: dimensionless (comparability finding)
Related records
- Answers question
- QST-004 not published in this release
Cite this
energyaperture.com/c/clm-0387
CLM-0387, Energy Aperture, as of 2026-09.