Trump’s Solar Power Border Wall Nonsense
This will soon convince you that President Trump needs a science advisor. The Mexican border largely runs East-West. The United States is on the North side of a border wall. The Sun is on the South side of the border wall. Solar cells vertical on the North Side will never see the sun except at sunrise and sunset, at shallow angles. If you are going to flatten the cells, and then move them to the top of the wall, or mount them near the wall at the correct South facing angle, you will save a fortune by moving them into a compact solar array far from a vulnerable border. You still have to keep cleaning the solar panels from desert dust.
By the way, solar cells are still expensive and very valuable. A 5 kiloWatt array still costs about $20,000. Mount them on the sunny South side of the wall, and they will disappear the first night. Mount them on the US side, and they might last a day until a tree trimming pod can be rented. A large part of the wall would be in Texas. Texas has the largest wind power farms. It has no need for solar power.
There’s also the question of losing electric energy through resistance over long electric lines. Solar power stations are often placed near main power lines. Trump’s 2200 mile solar power wall will have large resistance losses until it reaches a border town.
I think Trump proposed this to get some Democratic support for the wall. All it does is to make Trump’s science-less and anti-science administration into a laughing stock. Since Trump is practically the inventor of the falsehood that climate change is a Chinese hoax, it can only be for politics that he is trying to sell solar cells.
