https://stream.echo6.co/videos/watch/a1818ca7-d759-47de-9855-d3a9eb446c49 Will Trump's Mexican border solar powered wall pay for itself? Dave runs the numbers to find out what the solar payback is. NOTE: These are BEST CASE (non-practical) figures that don't include any system losses from a single long line array like this, or anything to do with the changing wall topology, or increased maintenance costs etc. The cost to maintain this system could be an order of magnitude higher than a traditional solar array farm. The point of the video is to check if the ballpark figure works out before getting more techniical, it doesn't. SPOILER: At best figure with no losses is $1BN payback for a 10 year period. 1/20th the cost of the wall. In practice it will be much worse than this, likely double the payback period or more. And if you want to argue it will pay back the solar install cost then why not install a normal utility scale solar array farm in the Texas desert? Much more efficient and practical. Installing a long array on a wall like this is a technically dumb idea. Forum: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-1002-trumps-solar-freakin-wall-busted/ EEVblog Main Web Site: http://www.eevblog.com The 2nd EEVblog Channel: http://www.youtube.com/EEVblog2 Support the EEVblog through Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/eevblog EEVblog Amazon Store (Dave gets a cut): http://astore.amazon.com/eevblogstore-20 T-Shirts: http://teespring.com/stores/eevblog 💗 Likecoin – Coins for Likes: https://likecoin.pro/@eevblog/dil9/hcq3 Sat, 09 May 2026 09:24:51 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://stream.echo6.co https://stream.echo6.co/client/assets/images/icons/icon-512x512.png https://stream.echo6.co/videos/watch/a1818ca7-d759-47de-9855-d3a9eb446c49 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://stream.echo6.co/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.