Why Airbus’s Plans for a Green Jet Remain Grounded
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That's 212-416-2236. We might answer your question in an upcoming episode. Now, on to the show. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Wednesday, April 23rd. I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal.

Anyone who's worked in an office knows about the perils of harsh, unflattering, fluorescent strip lights. But what if it didn't have to be that way? Today, we explore some high-tech, adaptive alternatives that are making their way into office buildings for a cost. And we'll be delving into Airbus' mission to build a zero-emissions jet, which, after five years and nearly $2 billion, is still years away from taking off.

But first, some good news. Those unforgiving fluorescent lights found in offices everywhere, well, they may soon be on their way out. Design firms have developed new programmable lights that can do things like adjust to match employees' circadian rhythms and mimic natural outdoor lighting, even in a totally windowless space. WSJ careers and workplace reporter Ray Smith has the story.

So, Ray, I'm looking up at the lighting in our office right now, and it doesn't look great. You might say it's a little bit old-fashioned, but what else is wrong with being under strip lighting all day, every day from your reporting? On a superficial level, this kind of lighting is unflattering. So sometimes if you catch yourself in the mirror, you're like, do I really look like that? That's a complaint I hear a lot about fluorescent lighting in offices is,

But other than that, it can really have an effect on your mental health. It can feel draining or worrying and cold. And so part of the overhaul, if you will, or makeover of office lighting is not just aimed at making you look better and being more flattering, but also aiming to boost your mental health in some ways, or at least sync with your body clock in terms of the time that you wake and rise.

Your story has some great imagery in there. And the one that blew my mind was this fake sunlight that some companies and offices were installing to give those sort of central offices without any access to natural sunlight, the appearance of that.

Is there any way you can describe for us what that looks like? And were you surprised by how well it looks? Yes, I was surprised just hearing it described to me and then seeing it are two different things. And it is borderline eerie because it's just it's literally a fake sky and a fake sun that looks like the real thing. It's these panels that mimic what it looks like outside. And so it's

called Virtual Sun and Circadian Sky. And these are products made by a company called Interscene. It's no surprise, perhaps, that the CEO there is a former video games maker. And this sort of mirrors like virtual reality in a way. But that's the goal. The goal is in buildings where there is little to no natural light or in Manhattan, for instance, where the sun is blocked by taller buildings next door.

These are designed for places that have really low access to natural light. Why would companies want to invest in office environments?

right now, especially when everybody's kind of looking down the line at their budgets and maybe feeling the squeeze slightly. It's really about making workers want to come back to the office. These landlords and these companies have a lot of real estate on their hands, and they're paying up for it. And they don't want workers to feel like

They come in and they hate it there and they want to spend less time there. The goal is to have them want to spend more time there, even if they're not mandated to be in the office five days a week. That was our reporter, Rae Smith. Coming up, why Airbus is hitting the brakes on its ambitions to build an emissions-free jet. That's after the break.

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In 2020, Airbus said it was going to figure out how to build a zero-emissions aircraft, powered by hydrogen, within 15 years. The company said the plane would put it front and centre in the aerospace industry's historic transition away from jet fuel.

But Airbus stumbled on some sizable roadblocks. And five years on, the company's cutting the project budget by a quarter and delaying its timeline by as much as a decade. Our aviation and aerospace reporter, Ben Katz, has been digging into this. So, Ben, we're talking about Airbus, a company that's made a lot of money over the last 50 or so years building planes that run on jet fuel.

When and why did the company begin to look at a greener type of energy? So the conversation around green flying, or in particular hydrogen-powered aircraft, started really in 2019 when Airbus' current CEO took over. But even before then, Airbus was exploring, maybe not in as committed a way, but they were exploring things like electric flight and using electricity to power aircraft. They

Then came 2020, and it really was this turning point for the company where they decided, you know what, sustainability is top of our agenda. We're going to really double down on bringing what really would have been this remarkable kind of leap in aviation technology, something we haven't really seen since the likes of the jet engine. And that was the pitch to bring a proper airliner powered by hydrogen fuel that would be close at least to a zero emission aircraft.

And Airbus really saw kind of an opportunity here, not just to appease governments and shareholders who were really shifting to ESG-focused funds, but also a competitive advantage. If Airbus could bring a new type of aircraft that was so much greener than anything currently on the market, that would propel it into really the first place position in the global battle with Boeing. Wow.

What were some of the biggest challenges that they were anticipating? And what were some of the challenges that Airbus did, in fact, run into? It's difficult to overstate how massive a challenge creating a hydrogen-powered jet was going to be, even when they announced it. You know, maybe we can break it down into two threads. The first thread is the technology itself.

So for a hydrogen powered aircraft, you know, it hasn't been done on this kind of scale. Airbus had envisioned a proper airliner that could carry as many as 200 passengers over about 2000 nautical miles. So the first challenge was really the technology, not only the question of how do you convert hydrogen into a fuel that can be used to power an aircraft, but also how do you store hydrogen? Hydrogen has to be stored separately.

at immensely cold temperatures, then you have to have the process of actually converting it into a fuel or a way to power the aircraft. The technology that Airbus ultimately settled on required this cryogenic chamber to store the fuel, but then also these fuel cells that added weight.

And whenever you add weight and additional equipment onto an aircraft, it makes it heavier and takes up space that could be used for seats. But also it means that the range and the performance becomes less economical. So you have the challenge of the technology on one side. On the other side, you have to have the buy-in of the wider industry. Hydrogen isn't the easiest fuel. The aviation industry, of course, is completely set up for jet fuel. What are some of the massive speed bumps that led

Airbus to put the brakes, as you put it in your story, on this green jet? So what we saw last year is Airbus having this reckoning with the technology and with the supply chain. On the technology front, they were starting to realize that their dreams of building a narrowbody aircraft closer to the A320 or the 737 MAX, that was proving harder than they expected.

And Airbus says that the broader ecosystem is five to 10 years behind where they thought it would be, making this 2035 ambition just no longer feasible. They're talking now about maybe 2045, but there's still a lot of question marks. They're going to have to go back and really redesign this aircraft while investing and developing new technology to even get close to the aircraft they dreamed of when they initially set out.

Has the company responded to your reporting? So Airbus is really insisting that the last five years, over $1.5 billion spent, that is far from a waste. They say that they've now proven, at least to themselves, that hydrogen is a feasible technology and that there is a reasonable route and a feasible route to building the aircraft that will make commercial sense.

At the same time, they're quite open and they admit that they don't want to be stuck with an aircraft that can't sell that isn't commercially viable. This instance is one in the long line of companies lately that have put the brakes on sustainable engineering efforts. Do you feel like this is part of a wider macro trend for car companies, for instance, pulling back on their eco efforts? Or is there something a little bit different?

It's a combination of two things. I definitely think it's part of this broader trend. Airbus is in a very different position to where it was in the 2020s, dealing with COVID, dealing with the pandemic. They secured a lot of funding and backing from the French government, the German government, the EU to support this project. Since then...

There are other kind of bigger things front of mind for the company. Of course, we've got the trade war and tariffs that are building at the moment. But Airbus also finds itself far ahead of its main rival, Boeing. Boeing entered an entirely new crisis at the beginning of last year, and it's still reeling from that. So some analysts, some people who follow the industry comment their take is wrong.

The pressure isn't as high as it was five years ago. Some of the focus on ESG funding and financing has kind of slipped away. We've seen a lot of reports and examples of investors losing a bit of their interest in the sustainability investment. And then at the same time, there is a question, did Airbus really just overcommit? That was WSJ reporter Ben Katz. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with Deputy Editor Kristen Sleeve.

I'm Katie Dayton for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TMB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.