Trump's Solar Wall

[The Romulan Republic]

The superconducting power line is the sort of thing that gets funded by governments that actually want to spend money on infrastructure. This does not include either the Trump Administration or the Republican-dominated 115th Congress.

I mean, I get the idea of "use Trump to do useful things." The problem is, Trump isn't useful to anyone except himself, and he's not even all that useful to himself now that he's doing a job where most of his core skill set is irrelevant.

His ability to undermine himself is really quite impressive at times.

He's a sociopath who's not even very good at being a sociopath.

[Darth Tanner]

You don't need to do that, you just have normal wire coming out at the tapping out points where necessary. Although I think superconducting transformers are better than non-superconducting ones so it would be probably better to do that part inside the sheath. Other sources would be nuclear, wind, fossil, other solar, etc. that just happen to be nearby. The idea is, if the superconducting line works well on the level of the wall it would hopefully be extended to go across the rest of the American continents too, tapping into power sources and users along there. The cryogens would come from cooling stations but MgB2 lines don't use liquid nitrogen cooling, they use liquid nitrogen/gaseous helium combos or liquid hydrogen.

If your building a mega nitrogen/helium/hydrogen cooled pipeline across the Mexico border to transport solar its to have a huge transformer/inverter station every could of km... it will solve the losses between nodes but every node will still be a major loss... I'm not sure the energy to keep the pipe cooled would not be signfiicnatly more than what the solar panels will be generating either! It would be a huge energy sink.

Are you sure about that cost... laying normal overhead hv cable costs £2m per km according to the UK grid... a fancy experimental super cooled pipe/cable is going to cost a lot more.

[jwl]

You don't need to do that, you just have normal wire coming out at the tapping out points where necessary. Although I think superconducting transformers are better than non-superconducting ones so it would be probably better to do that part inside the sheath. Other sources would be nuclear, wind, fossil, other solar, etc. that just happen to be nearby. The idea is, if the superconducting line works well on the level of the wall it would hopefully be extended to go across the rest of the American continents too, tapping into power sources and users along there. The cryogens would come from cooling stations but MgB2 lines don't use liquid nitrogen cooling, they use liquid nitrogen/gaseous helium combos or liquid hydrogen.

If your building a mega nitrogen/helium/hydrogen cooled pipeline across the Mexico border to transport solar its to have a huge transformer/inverter station every could of km... it will solve the losses between nodes but every node will still be a major loss... I'm not sure the energy to keep the pipe cooled would not be signfiicnatly more than what the solar panels will be generating either! It would be a huge energy sink.

Are you sure about that cost... laying normal overhead hv cable costs £2m per km according to the UK grid... a fancy experimental super cooled pipe/cable is going to cost a lot more.

I got the cost from fig. 7 here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 211501120X (red line)
What it also notes is that the sheath doesn't need to change much when you add capacity and the superconductor itself doesn't cost much.

So what you can have here is a 10 GW line running along the wall and another line of the same thickness running inside the same sheath to take the low-voltage direct solar power. As you can see from the low slope of the red line in the diagram, that doesn't increase the cost much. If (for example) you can get 125-volt power sources from your solar panels, being 1000 times less voltage than the 125 kV lines gives 1000 times less wire power, so you can run up 10 MW in the low-voltage wires. This means you would need a transformer/inverter station for every 10 MW of wall, rather than needing them basically continuously across the wall.

Cooling the pipe may indeed take more energy than the solar panels produce, I haven't worked it out. However, the addition of the low voltage line inside the sheath does not increase the amount of power the sheath draws for cooling, so this doesn't matter, because the line as a whole would still be very much power-positive. You could possibly say the function of the solar panels is to power the cooling stations on the higher-capacity superconducting wire. In fact, if that is the case, you could possibly ditch the inverter/transformer stations and plug the low-voltage wires directly into the cooling stations.

[Simon_Jester]

The superconducting power line is the sort of thing that gets funded by governments that actually want to spend money on infrastructure. This does not include either the Trump Administration or the Republican-dominated 115th Congress.

I mean, I get the idea of "use Trump to do useful things." The problem is, Trump isn't useful to anyone except himself, and he's not even all that useful to himself now that he's doing a job where most of his core skill set is irrelevant.

His ability to undermine himself is really quite impressive at times

He's a sociopath who's not even very good at being a sociopath.

Psychopath/sociopaths (in popular usage we tend to use the terms interchangeably, so I'm not going to pretend they're different things since I don't have a copy of the DSM-V in my lap)...

Well, basically, if you're born without a conscience, all you have are learned social defense mechanisms. You learn to defend against the specific problems that actually have the power to burn you, using the resources at your disposal. Trump's main resources are money and bullshitting, and he's good at hiring skilled people to use as attack dogs (e.g. lawyers), and bullshitting other powerful people (and weak people) to give him money. When he successfully bullshits powerful people, and his high-paid attack dogs do the rest for him, he calls it "deal-making."

Those are the defenses Trump has built up over his lifetime, to avoid the consequences he would otherwise suffer from being chronically irresponsible, vicious, short-sighted, and generally lacking a conscience.

...

That worked okay for him during the election, in particular because elections can come pretty close to being pure bullshitting contests.

But it's useless now that he's president. He can't hire a better secretary of state or national security adviser by offering to pay more than the competition, so one of his key defenses is useless. He can't bullshit the other powerful authority figures he has to deal with because that doesn't work in his new arena, so his "deal-making" prowess is useless.

The skills that allowed him to be a successful man for fifty years despite being such an utterly shitty excuse for a human being? They're pointless now.

It's as if he'd spent his whole life learning judo, a martial art designed to allow you to defend yourself against unarmed attackers, or maybe attackers with knives or something. And now he's been thrown into a gunfight. All his unarmed moves are useless, the defenses he knows are useless against the kind of attack he's facing, and his counterattacks are useless in that they can't even reach his enemies.

Naturally, he spends a lot of time cowering behind the biggest rock he can find, and his ability to 'punch' and actually accomplish anything is basically limited to sticking his gun up in the air and squeezing off rounds in hopes of blindly hitting something.

[Darth Tanner]

I'm not quite sure a technology used for 800-2000 meter lengths is quite ready for deployment over 2000 miles. Many of the claims are nay on wonderous especially when they claim it will be cheaper than current simpler and easier to maintain/build normal hv cabling. All the deomonstration models are ten times the cost cited.

Also I would still see no reason to include this as part of the wall except living in a bizarre world where you have a need to attach additional projects to the wall.

[TheFeniX]

Also I would still see no reason to include this as part of the wall except living in a bizarre world where you have a need to attach additional projects to the wall.

Trump's always seemed like a "spitballer" to me. He just says shit that pops into his head. Sometimes he hits a good one and it seems like actual competent people run with said ideas and he's like "I CAME UP WITH THAT."

Honestly, I get why my brother likes him so much. They're a lot alike in many ways, obviously money being a huge difference. But they are both unrepentant bullies toward anyone intimidated by them, but they also have moments of half-assed "good" ideas, but usually lacking in the ability to make it payoff.

Like, my brother spitballed an idea to me about us (50/50) opening up an ice-house in this one area. Thinking about, it was a great idea. But what he really meant was "you handle all the setup and financial responsibility while I work the bar and we go bankrupt from me never showing up to work and when I do I'm too busy giving out free drinks to my buddies and hot girls."

He did this same thing with wi-fi Internet using his house as the distribution center. Sadly, both these "services" came to the area in near the capacity we had talked about but those guys who set them up had actual business sense. I, meanwhile, could always get my brother to fuck off by saying "get me a proposed budget and makeshift business plan and we'll talk." I mean, I'd have taken them on an Etcha-Sketch, but I knew he was too lazy to even do that.

So, Trump is basically what happens if you give some lazy redneck millions of dollars, a cavalcade of yesmen, and unfettered access to social media.

[K. A. Pital]

That is some straight cyberpunk shit. I hope Trump fails to build it and there are massive god damn solar ruins.

[Zixinus]

Erm, no, it's clearly a biscuit tossed into a potentially hostile crowd. A big, green biscuit. Walls face towards the horizon, solar panels face up. You could mount it along the full length of the wall, or more likely on sections of the wall, but they will be solar panels giving electricity to nothing in the middle of nowhere. Would make more money just putting the panels in flat patches of the desert that have no use. At which point, all the use you can get from the wall is using it as mounted power lines. This is on top of the problem that if one of the solar panels brake, you will have to run down the length of the wall to find it rather than find it among a big patch. The other, more clear problems others have pointed out.

The thing is that the wall itself is a big political biscuit. It will not be built, or if it will, it will be a purely political money-dump with enough holes in it for private interest for it to be mistaken for a sieve. Definitely not as the wall as advertised, seriously intent on securing an over 3000km (nearly 2000 miles) long border.