The Engineers’ Plan for Creating Border Security With Clean Energy

The nearly 2,000-mile border that separates the U.S. and Mexico is not an easily navigable environment. It meanders across deserts and canyons, riverbeds and wetlands. It’s dotted unevenly with fences, walls, and checkpoints built to control immigration between the countries.

President Donald Trump, a year and a half ago, proposed putting solar panels here, on the border wall that had been a rallying cry of his campaign. “Look, there’s no better place for solar than the Mexico border—the southern border,” he said at the time.

It’s not infeasible, technically. The notion of a solar-paneled border wall might have seemed underdeveloped, but a group of scientists based out of Purdue University and other large research institutions are now proposing a plan that, they say, would unite the Republican Party’s call for more border security with the Democratic Party’s calls for a Green New Deal.

Instead of a concrete barrier, these engineers and