Leanna Garfield for Business Insider:  During a White House meeting with Republican Congressional leaders on June 6, President Trump discussed plans for his proposed US-Mexico border wall. As Axios reported, he pitched covering the wall in solar panels and using the generated electricity to pay for its construction.

Estimations of how much energy a solar border wall would actually produce vary, depending on the size of the array and the wall itself. But some companies are already imagining what it would look like.

How much electricity a hypothetical solar border wall could generate

Oregon-based solar installation firm called Elemental Energy calculated that a wall with 10-foot-high solar paneling would generate approximately 7.28 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity each day.

Elemental's co-owner, John Grieser, broke down the math to Business Insider like this:

In his hypothetical calculation, the solar panels would be mounted to the wall at a fixed tilt and orientation (meaning they wouldn't move to track the sun, which is a more expensive option), Grieser says. Each panel would feature 72 solar cells, and measure 78 inches high.

The US southern border measures nearly 2,000 miles across four states, but only about half of that length is on unobstructed land. A thousand miles converts to 63.36 million inches. When you divide that by the size of each panel (78 inches), you get 812,308 columns of panels (oriented in landscape).

Typically, fixed tilt solar arrays feature five rows of panels, and a 30-degree tilt would create a 10-foot-tall array. Trump reportedly said the wall would be 40 to 50 feet high, but Grieser says Elemental's calculations are for a shorter array.  Full Article: