On Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump shared a new idea with congressional Republicans:
His vision was a [U.S.-Mexico border] wall 40 feet to 50 feet high and covered with solar panels so they’d be “beautiful structures,” the people said. The president said that most walls you hear about are 14 feet or 15 feet tall but this would be nothing like those walls. Trump told the lawmakers they could talk about the solar-paneled wall as long as they said it was his idea. “One person cautioned that the President wasn’t presenting the solar-paneled wall as the definite solution,” adds Jonathan Swan, the Axios reporter who first reported most of the news.
Despite the president’s insistence on getting credit, this is not the first time someone has suggested swaddling the wall in solar panels. During the government’s call for proposals in April, a small, Las Vegas-based construction-supply firm named Gleason Partners suggested a suspiciously similar plan. It proposed building a wall of cement, steel, and solar panels. Each mile of wall would cost $7.5 million, it said, but each mile would also generate two megawatts of electricity. This power could then be sold to utilities on both sides of the border.