This was a novel idea at the time, but it made sense. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House.
They were removed just seven years later under President Ronald Reagan. But their story didn’t end there. They were picked up cheaply by a small university in Maine, where they continued to generate electricity for years, and were eventually dispersed to the United States and China.
When the panels were first installed on the roof of the West Building, energy independence was a big issue in America. The oil embargo imposed by Arab countries in 1973, in part to pressure the United States over its support for Israel in the brief war that year, shocked the American economy.
“Our dependence on foreign oil resources is of great concern to all of us,” Carter said at an event introducing the solar array. “No one can embargo the sun or disrupt our supply of the sun.”
This was 10 years before the first Congressional hearing on climate change. Ernest Moniz, who served as Secretary of Energy under President Barack Obama and is now CEO of the Energy Futures Initiative, a nonprofit focused on renewable energy, said, “Jimmy Carter There is no doubt that we were far ahead of the curve.”
In 1986, the Reagan administration had the panels removed during work on the White House roof. It was never reinstalled.
The rejected panels, which were used to heat water at the White House, were shipped to the Washington suburbs and languished in a warehouse in Virginia for years. And in 1991, Peter Merback, director of Unity College of Maine, was trying to figure out how to dig the school out of a financial hole. He found a photo of the panels in a magazine and decided he wanted to bring them back to life.
“There was a combination of utter disbelief and anger that President Reagan had ousted them, and a crazy ‘light bulb’ idea to get a panel and draw attention to Unity’s mission as an environmental university.” said Marbach, now a university professor. Landscape photographer based in Oregon.
He wrote a letter to Mr. Carter asking for his blessing. The former president quickly responded with a handwritten note saying he was very happy to see the panel used again.
Within six weeks, Mr. Marbach removed the seats from a blue bus used by Unity’s soccer team and drove it to Virginia. He rode a golf cart through a building that reminded me of the warehouse scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He found the panels piled haphazardly in a corner among a jumble of wooden boxes and surplus furniture. Some were broken. But Marbach loaded all the exiled panels onto a bus and took them back to Maine.
Unity College paid the U.S. government $500 to maintain the panel, which originally cost about $28,000 to install.
Half of the time ended up boiling water on the rooftop of Unity College’s cafeteria. The other half that did not fit into the building was stored in a former chicken house and used as spare parts.
Marbach said acquiring the panel was “more symbolic” but certainly helped the university save money. These remained in place until the end of their lifespan in 2010.
At least six people have made the journey beyond Maine since then.
In 2007, one or two panels were loaded into the back of a pickup truck and transported from Unity College to the Carter Library in Atlanta by a documentary team making a film about Carter’s solar legacy, A Road Not Taken. I did.
In 2009, another one was donated to the National Museum of American History in Washington. A spokesperson for the Smithsonian Institution said the panels are still on display.
The Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China, acquired another panel in 2010. In the same year, another panel was donated to the Solar Energy Industry Association. Others are held by the U.S. Department of Energy with NRG Systems, Inc., a Vermont clean energy manufacturer, and the rest are still held by Unity College, which has changed its name to Unity Environmental University.
Carter appears to have known that the transition to clean energy would face obstacles.
“A generation from now, this solar heater could be a curio, a piece of museum, an example of an untrodden path, or just one part of the biggest and most exciting adventure Americans have ever taken. Sometimes there isn’t,” he said in 1979.
But while the White House panel didn’t last long, experts say Carter’s decision to support renewable energy helped position the U.S. for the ongoing clean power boom. It is said that
“This is an important step in the development and growth of solar energy use in the United States,” said Frederick Morse, who served as a senior Energy Department official under Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan and is now CEO of solar developer Solstore Energy. It was the foundation.” .
