(Newswire.net — June 28, 2017) –“We are thinking of something that’s unique. The southern border – lots of sun, lots of heat. We are thinking about building a wall as a solar wall. So it creates energy. And pays for itself,” US President Donald Tramp said last week, at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
He added that it is his idea and that the wall can be beautiful and pay for itself.
“I think we can make it look beautiful too. It would really look beautiful. That would be nice,” Trump said and made a joke that the solar installation would cost Mexico “much less money”.
”This way, Mexico will have to pay much less money,” Trump noted.
The gathering addressed by Tramp liked the idea of erecting a solar wall along the border between the US and Mexico, which was also one the main topics of the presidential election campaign. On the other hand, environmental groups describe it as science fiction.
Major environmental lobbying groups have negatively reacted in media and on social networks.
“His alternative facts did help produce more hot air powering the Hawkeye state’s plentiful wind farms that employ over 8,000 people,” tweeted Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director.
”Shiny solar panels won’t distract us – US taxpayers are still paying for this boondoggle of a wall and the damage it will cause,”’ he also wrote, concluding that “no matter how you dress it up, a border wall is still a terrible idea and an ecological disaster.”
Nick Loris, a research fellow in energy and environmental policy at The Heritage Foundation, said that there are too many outstanding questions about building a border wall as a solar wall.
”It’s difficult to know what the solar panels would cost, how much energy they’d produce standing vertically as opposed to angled horizontally like you see at a solar farm or a rooftop,” Loris told The Daily Signal.
On January 25, US President Donald Trump signed a directive on building a 2,000-mile wall along the border with Mexico, but construction works have not been launched yet.