Ed Ballard

speaker

163 appearances 7 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 30 Aug

Ed Ballard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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WSJ Tech News Briefing · How Recycling Could Upend the Rare Earth Metals Market · 30 Jan 2026 podcast

To take one example of how this actually works in practice, one of the big sources of old electronics that they're using is old hard drives from data centers, which contain little tiny magnets in the corner of each one.

And the cyclic deals with the recycling companies to take those hard drives, slice off the corners which contain the magnets, and then process those to remove the earths so that they can be refined once again into new metal.

There are various different approaches out there, but the key is who can do this in a cost-effective way.

I would say that probably it's not going to be enough on its own to meet all of, say, US demand.

Because if you think about it mathematically, you can only recycle what's already out there, right?

So a lot of, like, we think of all the old phones you might have sitting in a drawer at home.

Each of those has got a tiny little magnet in them.

And so lots of this stuff is never going to be recycled.

It's just going to sort of languish.

So the amount you can recycle is always going to be less than...

what's already there.

But that doesn't mean it can't be a kind of significant contribution to US demand.

WSJ What’s News · Big, Beautiful Bill Nears Tense House Vote · 20 May 2025 podcast

So it was always expected that the flow of new offshore wind projects would pretty much dry up with Trump in charge. But the sector was really rocked by the suspension of the Empire Wind project because it was already so far advanced. Approvals were granted last year and Equinor had invested $2.5 billion as of March.

So folks were really worried that other already approved projects might be cancelled as well.

Clearly, this is a major relief for the offshore wind sector in the US. Just looking at this one project, the fact that Empire Wind is back on again will secure jobs for an estimated 1,500 people and provide enough power for half a million homes in New York just in its first phase.

This will probably give other kinds of investors more confidence to invest in energy projects because the idea that the government could cancel projects that are already well into construction is a deterrent against committing capital.

WSJ What’s News · India Sees a Golden Opportunity in U.S.-China Trade War · 22 Apr 2025 podcast

So these are some pretty punchy headline numbers, and no one is going to be paying a tariff rate of 3,500%, which is the rate that was imposed on some solar cells from Cambodia. At the low end, it's about 41%, which might be more manageable. Let's take a step back.

These are four countries where Chinese companies that dominate the solar industry have set up factories in recent years precisely to get around U.S. restrictions on imports. Now, to get ahead of this latest round of tariffs, they have been setting up factories in new places such as Laos and Indonesia, which aren't covered by these new tariffs.

So if you're a solar manufacturer, you've had some time to set up new sourcing relationships and find new factories to supply the solar cells you need. And of course, that raises a possibility that this game of whack-a-mole will just continue.

And we'll see a continuing race between domestic solar manufacturers complaining about low-cost competitors and the Chinese companies looking for new places to produce solar cells that will eventually find their way into the U.S. market.

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