Hi Here we go. Solar freakin' Wolves! It's all a freaking roadways. It wasn't bad enough. Now we've got Trump coming out and saying that the Mexican wall he wants to build will be solar-powered and it'll pay for itself.

now. Normally I wouldn't touch politics like this with a bargepole, but in this case, hey, this is engineering. This is basic back-of-the-envelope stuff. We can do basic calculations to see if this wall can actually pay for itself.

so never thought I'd say this on this channel, but take it away. Trump Only in America We're already spending a lot of money and design, but I'll give you an idea that nobody has heard about yet. and I'm not sure. but I'm a builder.

That's what I love to do. That's probably what I do best. I'm a builder and we're thinking of something that's unique. We're talking about the southern border.

Lots of Sun lots of heat. We're thinking about building the wall as a solar wall so it creates energy and pays for itself. Paid first. God, nothing that.

Alright, let's here we go. We can actually do back-of-the-envelope calculations to this. so let's get into it. Now, How much? First we need to know how much does the war cost.

Well, a internal report costed at twenty one point Six billion dollars. Trump's own campaign said it'll cost a twelve billion dollars. So yeah, like we can take it as ten or twenty billion dollars. It doesn't matter, so it's around about that figure.

Now, a lot of people don't know that the US Mexican border is about three thousand kilometres long I won't work in miles awaking Kilometres 3000 K is long and they already have about a thousand kilometers worth of our war already built. Previous administrations have built walls and then it was. You know, ran out of money and they didn't want to build anymore. So they want to build for this ten or twelve to twenty billion dollars.

I wouldn't be able to thousand kilometers worth of war. So we know how much it costs roughly and we know how long it is. great. Well, let's take a look at what does Utility Scale: Not just commercial, but utility scale solar.

Actually our cost. It's as a fairly recent Daripada I'm not sure. Yeah, it must pretty. It's probably close to the latest.

It is now dropped below a dollar fifty per watt installed. This is incredible for a utility scale and it's a dollar fifty for a hundred mega watt system with single axis tracking. This is fantastic and you can go in and have a look at this as the National Renewable Energy Labs report. they do this every year quarter and they've got all the figures in here for a basically fixed tilt systems.

and so it's a dollar Forty two for a fixed tilt system. and it's a dollar fifty for a single axis tilt system. If you don't know, a single axis tilt system on a commercial or on a utility scale, farm looks something like this: phase tilt in one axis and that's what we're going to assume Because we're not going to assume that they're stupid enough that you know Trump high, but the people who are tasked with implementing this real engineers right. They're going to say no.

Let's port A. If you had to do it, you would put a tilting axes system like this. You could even get an individual two axes system like that so we can run the numbers on this. So we have the cost, we have the distance, we have our the cost per panel of our solar panels, and then we can now take a look at a commercial solar panel that you'd use in a typical utility scale thing like this.

and we can get the basic. This is a 200 a 435 watt panel. Okay, so we'll take that figure four hundred and thirty-five watts and we note that it's just over a meter across 1.05 meters across. In that direction, we should mount them vertically portrait not landscape on top of a wall like this to get the greatest dimensional efficiency.

Let's assume 1.5 meters spread between the panels to compensate for the space between and space between individual systems because the walls going to be curving all over the shop. and let's just assume 1.5 meters spread. So 435 watt panel with a 1.5 meter spread is around about 290 watts per meter. so we use that figure.

So what's the total size of this system assuming a single linear array of one axis Tilt in our commercial utility scale, Are panels like this? Well, 2,000 kilometres long is 2 million meters times 291 is a nominal system installation capacity of 580 megawatts or 580 thousand kilowatts. Pretty decent-sized system and it's going to cost a pretty penny. -. And how much would that cost exactly? Well, at about one dollar, fifty per watt, and 580 thousand kilowatt, that system would cost about eight hundred and seventy million dollars.

Sounds expensive, but in the scheme of a 12 to 20 billion dollar wall, you know less than an order of magnitude. So you can say don't worry about it So no, we have to find out how much power it actually generates. Now let's take a Browns Villa Texas I Don't want my viewers in Brownsville Texas because it's the most southern point. It's right down here.

There it is Brownsville right on the US Mexican border, right? the southern point I Like I'm just going to take that and just say that's the solar insolation figure for you know the whole war because otherwise you know if you had to go to town, it would be a real complex calculation. So that's basically a best-case calculation. So let's choose that. this is the Pvwatts calculator.

This is once again the national and it Renewable Energy lab government things. So this is where they get their own figures from. So our Ray type here. We can't actually do tracking because the wall is north-south and we have to align them that way.

We can't actually track east and west as the Sun goes over. so we're just going to have to do a fixed. If you were able to track then like if you did a two axis tracking for example in individual units, then you could actually get better efficiency out of this thing than by twenty twenty-five percent. Or you know something of that order.

You can go in here and just run the numbers again. Anyway, system losses would just leave that in there. It's the default value. The tilt angle has been pre-populated for this position.

our azimuth is 180 degrees, which is directly south, and of course we're assuming that they wouldn't be dumb enough. Well, okay, Trump but the engine here that would have to implement this wouldn't be dumb enough to put them flat on the wall. I can run the calculations on that of how efficient that would be. You would lose basically 50% if you actually had them vertically on the wall, and you can probably get twice the number on there.

but what's twice the number at half the efficiency? It's basically exactly the same output. So even if you had a four meter high wall course each panels two meters. if you can stack them four meters high, it still isn't going to affect these numbers at all. It just doubles the cost.

and we've got a commercial system, so if we're going here, 500,000 Q Lots of what a massive system. We get all the numbers here it is. It's actually very impressive it want to be for a system of this size. It actually generates 715 million kilowatt hours per year, So gigawatt hours per year.

And the revenue is actually a lot. It is seventy seven point seven million dollars a year. Not too shabby. And then we'll go back in there and run the exactly the same thing again for the extra eighty thousand that we needed.

So that's an extra 12 million, twelve point four million dollars revenue a year. So we can add those together. So it gives us a total figure of just over ninety million dollars a year. And we said, that's not too shabby at all.

Let's say it's around about ballpark a hundred million dollars a year revenue. Unfortunately, the wall costs 10 to 20 billion dollars. So even after ten years which you know and start to get a little bit flaky, the system could last, you know, 20 or something like that. But let's say after 10 years, it generates a billion dollars in revenue.

So after 10 years, it's still an order of magnitude. More than an order of magnitude less than the cost of the system. So the answer to the question is, will this wall pay for itself? The answer is no by an order of magnitude. So there you go there back-of-the-envelope calculations.

They're not going to change a huge amount so you know it's not like I'm going to be off by an order of magnitude. That's just the calculation so no shop was full go figure. And whoever was advising him on this is no, they're out by an order of magnitude. Don't hope you found that informative.

Catch you next time you.