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Trump pitched Republican leaders on a solar-paneled border wall

E

evil solrac v3.0

Member
Johnny9Alive said:
Well, because it's actually relevant again as he mentioned it publically.
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it's still a bad idea.



Johnny9Alive said:
No it wouldn't? The Sun is good enough that you can get a good amount of energy facing it north.
Second, you obviously wouldn't have on the face of the wall. What you do is you add a slope atop the wall and place the panels on that.

The issue, the cost obviously. But, you can build the wall and attach the panels at a later date as well as look into researching a more cost effective solar panel
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so now we're adding more costs to the wall on top of now having to research even more efficient solar panels from an administration that has not been inclined to invest in green energy. and if by some miracle it stops illegal immigration (it won't) now we screw over the agricultural industry and double food prices. all because some orange asshole can't be bothered to come up with something that's not a xenophobic, racist solution to illegal immigration.
 
Premium Quality

Premium Quality

Member
Someone should tell Trump about the efficiency of cars that run on magnets.
relbDdt.jpg


I still don't understand the point of having solar-panels on the wall. Does he want it lighted up at night?
 
B

Bam Bam Baklava

Member
This is why populism is a bad thing. Everything sounds great to the uninformed masses. Solar panels on walls and it pays for itself and free college for everybody!

This is not a steady or stable path for the country to be on. A place where realistic policy isn't even being discussed anymore in favor of pie in the sky fantasies.
 
B

Breads

Banned
Johnny9Alive said:
No it wouldn't? The Sun is good enough that you can get a good amount of energy facing it north.
Second, you obviously wouldn't have on the face of the wall. What you do is you add a slope atop the wall and place the panels on that.

The issue, the cost obviously. But, you can build the wall and attach the panels at a later date as well as look into researching a more cost effective solar panel
Click to expand...
So what you're saying is that this:

Johnny9Alive said:
I like how there really isn't an argument against this outside of the fact that Trump proposed, so it has to be bad.
Apparently solar is bad when Trump wants it.
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...Is full of shit. There are reasons why this is a poorly thought out idea and you even admit to it.
 
T

TheRagnCajun

Member
I'm having a hard time understanding why the solar panels need to go on his wall. They could literally be placed anywhere and still cost the same and work the same.
 
T

Tyraniboah

Member
Bloomberg's analysis on cost if anybody is interested.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...all-into-a-solar-plant-is-probably-a-bad-idea




I'm all for solar panels where possible, but the wall is a shitty idea. Less than 2% of the population lives within 40 miles of the border. Even if you can convince every last one of them to convert to Trump Power and Light™ we're still stuck footing the bill for this wall. It's not paying for itself and it's certainly not solving a single problem with immigration in this country.
 
C

crazygambit

Member
Izuna said:
Not a bad idea on a bad idea. Hmm
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Actually, it's pretty terrible.

To be effective solar panels need to actually aim at the sun. Lots of solar plants have moving panels for that reason. The ones that have fixed panels have them at an optimum angle to maximize exposure, and that angle is much closer to 0° than 90° at around 15°-20°. Which it's why it works on roofs, but no one is pitching solar panel walls.

It's much more efficient to just build a solar plant instead. And this is not even counting transmission lines and the like.

TheRagnCajun said:
I'm having a hard time understanding why the solar panels need to go on his wall. They could literally be placed anywhere and still cost the same and work the same.
Click to expand...

They'd work much better.
 
D

Diablos

Member
Hey, I wonder if Al Gore planted this trollish seed when he talked to Trump after the election? Wouldn't that be hilarious...
 
M

MarionCB

Member
This is severely dumb, and also a transparent attempt to pretty up Trump's ugly wall with the kind of thought a 4 year-old puts into a crayon drawing.

Just to focus on one aspect of the stupidity: any solar panels placed on this wall would be much more efficiently utilised elsewhere and thus a significant amount of the cost of the panels would be wasted.

A requirement to place them on the wall severely limits the ability to design the system for its purpose. Usually, you'd design this to allow the most efficient geographical location with regard to solar collection and transmission to the power grid, and also configured and placed in an optimal way. Strung out along a wall in a line built under the wall's design considerations and at the border is pretty much a worst case scenario in design constraints.

If you want to build a solar plant, build a solar plant; don't stick it onto something else as an afterthought. Or even better, use the money for them to buy or simply subsidise putting them on houses. It's incredibly efficient as it eliminates transmission costs and even better, it directly helps individual families. And that isn't my idea, you don't need to give me credit; most other countries already do this because they have decent Governments who aren't led by nefarious idiots.
 
G

Grizzle_Dat

Banned
You may think its stupid but a 1200 mile wall with just one linear panel across the top would generate an impressive amount of electricity . Thats 960 panels per mile , using 300 watt panels you have 288,000 watts per mile or abut 345 Megawatts of solar for the length of the wall with just one panel width that could feed the grid.

Its not practical but they could do pieces of the wall more dense which would make maintenance more practical.
 
B

Bam Bam Baklava

Member
Grizzle_Dat said:
You may think its stupid but a 1200 mile wall with just one linear panel across the top would generate an impressive amount of electricity . Thats 960 panels per mile , using 300 watt panels you have 288,000 watts per mile or abut 345 Megawatts of solar for the length of the wall with just one panel width that could feed the grid.

Its not practical but they could do pieces of the wall more dense which would make maintenance more practical.
Click to expand...

I think I'll take the more thorough analysis from the Bloomberg article over your napkin math.

Gordon Johnson, a New York-based analyst at Axiom Capital Management, modeled the idea in a research note. He found:

A 40-foot-high wall more than 1,300 miles long would have an area of 279 million square feet.
The 13,358,136 21-square-foot solar panels needed to cover that much area would be rated at 4.7 gigawatts.
Factoring in equipment and development costs, the solar project would add an additional $7.6 billion to Trump's $20 billion border wall.

If constructed, the border-wall-solar-plant would generate about $221 million in annual profit. Without adjusting for inflation, taxpayers would be in the black after a term of just 125 years.

Unfortunately, the value of money changes over time. So, discounting at a rate of 10 percent, even 215 years of $221 million annual payments would shrivel up to $2.2 billion in real dollars—leaving a $25.4 billion gap.

In other words, taxpayers would never recoup their costs.
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To top it all off, no one is close enough to use the power being generated. Unless you want to add some expensive additional infrastructure to allow it.
 
K

KingV

Member
Grizzle_Dat said:
You may think its stupid but a 1200 mile wall with just one linear panel across the top would generate an impressive amount of electricity . Thats 960 panels per mile , using 300 watt panels you have 288,000 watts per mile or abut 345 Megawatts of solar for the length of the wall with just one panel width that could feed the grid.

Its not practical but they could do pieces of the wall more dense which would make maintenance more practical.
Click to expand...

No transmission losses on that right?

Also someone earlier saying the panels should be faced north? Wtf kind of du,b shit is that? Anyone that lives somewhere that gets more than an inch of snow per year can tell you a south facing driveway gets a lot more sun than a north facing one. Or anyone familiar with the equator and seasons.
 
K

KingV

Member
greepoman said:
As people have pointed out it's cheaper to just build a wall and solar farms separately and you don't gain anything by putting them together and it would cost quite a bit more to build them together.

Even if for some magical reason you're able to build the solar wall the main problem is trying to maintenance and distribution of energy over such long distances. Maintenance men might drive hundreds of miles a day to perform repairs.
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To perform repairs 50 foot in the sky!

Edit: my guess is Jared thought up this stupid idea and Trump didn't bother to vet it. Or did vet it and thought his experience as a reality tv star made him know better than the experts.

I also have even odds that Trump calls Jared "my daughters husband, the guy that owns Subway"
 
B

Binabik15

Member
I'm pretty sure "solar panels on the (top of) 'The Wall(TM)'" was among the ideas pitched by architects and think tanks earlier this year. That means his this-is-my-idea-don't-steal-it-look-daddy-what-I-made-for-an-idea-oh-daddy-why-don't-you-love-me was SO BIGLY GREAT that those people traveled in time to STEAL it! SAD!
 
A

aspiegamer

Member
You'd have to use the top of the wall for panels for any substantive output. Just plastering them on one side would be ridiculously inefficient and you'd get a very low % of potential energy out of it. Having a single row of panels on the top slanted correctly might get you almost the same returns as a full side. This is on 100% straight parts of the wall, too, mind you. Depending on how its curved it could be even less efficient on the sides. If you crowned the top few feet even 10-20 degrees it would help a lot. Yesterday was the summer solstice, with the sun angle almost precisely upright at 90 degrees. The side of a wall would collect zero energy.

Plus, if you were to use them on the side, you'd have to do it on the Mexico side and good luck protecting that. There's never going to be a wall, of course, but it'll always be a punchline to laugh about thankfully. That estimated $20B is off by an order of magnitude, too.

I'd say that if you're taking the effort to construct things so far in the middle of nowhere that you might as well do some wind turbines but the southwest isn't a particularly good production area for it. Hell, I'd say it'd be a good excuse to do some kind of joint hydro or nuclear plan but the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers don't have enough flow for either.
mo60 said:
Maybe we can use these solar paneled border walls to power the electricity grid in the US.
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We'd do better just building a normal solar farm somewhere else with the same $20B. These numbers floated in the thread would be ~10 square miles worth, which close to a population center in the southwest could cover massive energy needs (hi, Phoenix). There are some farms in China that size.
 
A

Amalthea

Banned
TheRagnCajun said:
I'm having a hard time understanding why the solar panels need to go on his wall. They could literally be placed anywhere and still cost the same and work the same.
Click to expand...
For an idiot with idiot logic like him, they
have to be part of the wall to help paying off itself.
 
jono51

jono51

Banned
Why not use coal to power an electric fence? It doesn't need to be high then as any undesirables would just get zapped, plus it will bring back millions of jobs.
 
N

nephilimdj

Member
Washington newspapers get paid by lobby groups to push rubbish to increase subsidies to solar industry, then complains solar wall is too expensive.

Circle of curruption fucking over tax payers lol
 
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