Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, January 13th. I'm Isabelle Bousquet for The Wall Street Journal. The Trump administration has slashed subsidies for solar and renewable energy. But in many segments of the market, solar deals are persisting. We're shedding light on why. Then, AI is everywhere these days, including recycling plants.
It turns out some new tech is pretty good at sorting through streams of garbage. We'll dive into how it works and the valuable treasures it's plucking out of the trash. But first, solar projects have been under fire recently. The Trump administration has slashed incentives for renewable power and called the sun and wind-powered energy the scam of the century.
Chapter 2: How has the Trump administration affected solar energy subsidies?
But despite that, the sun is still shining on some solar deals. Some companies are still betting on solar energy, which can sometimes be faster and cheaper to get up and running than natural gas sites. What does it mean for where the renewables industry is headed? WSJ sustainability reporter Clara Hudson joins us now to break it down.
So what kinds of companies and industries are investing in renewable energy and making these deals?
It's really interesting because the outlook for the solar industry is maybe a lot more complex than you might think. So the Trump administration has criticized it and cut subsidies, but then it seems like Big business still thinks this is an energy source that they need to be investing in. And that is in part because it's relatively inexpensive and quick to get up and running.
So what kinds of companies and industries are investing in renewable energy and making these deals?
Essentially, any company that has a pledge to use lower carbon energy sources might consider solar. So there are definitely environmental reasons. But it's also important for a business to diversify where it's going to get its energy from and to have a mix of sources.
In terms of which companies in particular are investing in solar, big tech companies like Meta and Google made some solar announcements last year. But even in the fashion industry, Tapestry, which owns Coach and Kate Spade, just made an announcement about some solar project developments too.
So you talk about the tech industry, and I'm curious, how big a role is the AI boom and the need to secure energy for data centers playing and driving some of these business to solar companies?
It's a really big part of the picture. So tech companies in particular need to have a broad energy strategy for how they're going to power the growing demands of AI. And they really need everything that they can get, including solar. And this is a really developing area at the moment. So Google has even said that it's planning to use solar power from satellites in space to power AI in the future.
That is really interesting. So it seems like there's a lot of business that is happening here. But have the Trump policies slashing incentives hurt the industry at all?
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Chapter 3: What factors are driving companies to invest in solar energy?
America's recycling sorting facilities are undergoing a pretty significant technological revolution thanks to AI. And what is happening with AI is it's sort of replacing a lot of the humans that would stand over these conveyor belts and have to like grab all the beer cans or the cardboard boxes or whatever they're trying to sort. The AI is taking over as sort of a brain. It watches everything.
They put these boxes over the conveyor belts that watch every item and they instantly recognize what it is, if it's food grade material, how much the market price of it might be in the commodities markets to resell this stuff. Some of these even calculate like the center of gravity for each piece of recycling that you throw away so that a robotic claw or something could grab it down the line.
It's like a really remarkable thing, and it's taking one of probably the least desirable jobs in the country away.
So are we primarily talking about items that Americans have placed in our color-coded recycling bins or is this really applied to all of our trash?
Well, it's sort of being applied to all the trash. And the reason, you know, a lot of these facilities just take the recycling, right? Single stream recycling where you don't really separate your cans from your plastic bottles, from your cardboard boxes, but all goes into like one bag or two bags. That all gets taken to something called a material recovery facility or a MRF.
And those are all over the country. And that's sort of the standard way to do it is sort through once humans have at home separated what they think is recyclable and what's not. Now, basically, humans are really bad. Americans in particular are really bad at recycling. We have bad recycling habits. We usually don't really know what's desirable, what's recyclable. And so it's a mess.
And a lot of the really valuable stuff goes into the trash. So these companies are starting to come back to the idea that maybe we just throw it all in one trash bag and then they sort it. Let the computers do the work. One big reason for not sorting through trash to get aluminum cans out, for example, is it's gross and unhealthy. And you shouldn't expect people to have to do that.
If it's robots controlling machines, they don't care how disgusting it is.
One element of your reporting that fascinated me was about how many processing facilities now use puffs of air rather than like robots with claws to separate materials. Can you explain how that works?
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