A Brief History of White House Solar Panels A Brief History of White House Solar Panels By Tom Murse Updated August 23, 2016. President Barack Obama's decision in 2010 to install White House solar panels made environmentalists happy. But he wasn't the first president to take advantage of alternative forms of energy in the living quarters at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . The first solar panels were placed on the White House more than 30 years earlier (and removed by the very next president), but there's been little explanation as to why nearly two decades later. What happened to the original White House solar panels? Here's a look back at a strange saga spanning six presidential administrations. PhotoQuest/Contributor/Archive Photos/Getty Images 1. 1979 - President Jimmy Carter Installs 1st White House Solar Panels President Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the presidential mansion amid the Arab oil embargo, which had caused a national energy crisis. The Democratic president called for a campaign to conservative energy and, to set an example to the American people, ordered the solar panels erected in 1979, according to the White House Historical Association.

Carter predicted that “a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people; harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.” More » 2. 1981 - President Ronald Reagan Orders Solar Panels on the White House Removed President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, and one of his first moves was to order the solar panels removed. It was clear Reagan had a completely different take on energy consumption. "Reagan's political philosophy viewed the free market as the best arbiter of what was good for the country. Corporate self-interest, he felt, would steer the country in the right direction," the author Natalie Goldstein wrote in " Global Warming ." George Charles Szego, the engineer who persuaded Carter to install the solar panels, reportedly claimed that Reagan Chief of Staff Donald T.

Regan "felt that the equipment was just a joke, and he had it taken down." The panels were removed in 1986 when work was being done on the White House roof below the panels. 3. 1992 - White House Solar Panels Moved to Maine College Half of the solar panels that once generated energy at the White House were installed on the roof of the cafeteria at Maine's Unity College, according to Scientific American. The panels were used to warm water in summer and winter. 4. 2010 - President Barack Obama Orders Solar Panels Reinstalled on White House President Barack Obama, who made environmental issues a focus of his presidency, planned to install solar panels on the White House by spring of 2011. He also announced he will also install a solar hot water heater on top of the living quarters at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. "By installing solar panels on arguably the most famous house in the country, his residence, the president is underscoring that commitment to lead and the promise and importance of renewable energy in the United States," said Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Administration officials said they expected the photovoltaic system will convert sunlight into 19,700 kilowatt hours of electricity a year. More » Where Did the Carter White House's Solar Panels Go? - Scientific American Scientific American Sustainability Where Did the Carter White House's Solar Panels Go? One of the 32 solar-thermal panels that captured energy on the roof of the White House more than 30 years ago landed this week at a science museum in China By David Biello on August 6, 2010 Credit: Courtesy of Mark Tardif Advertisement | Report Ad The White House itself once harvested the power of the sun. On June 20, 1979, the Carter administration installed 32 panels designed to harvest the sun's rays and use them to heat water. Here is what Carter predicted at the dedication ceremony: "In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy….

A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece , an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people." For some of the solar panels it is the former that has come to pass: one resides at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History , one at the Carter Library and, as of this week, one will join the collection of the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China. Huang Ming, chairman of Himin Solar Energy Group Co. , the largest manufacturer of such solar hot water heaters in the world, accepted the donation for permanent display there on August 5. After all, companies like his in China now produce some 80 percent of the solar water heaters used in the world today. But they are based on the same technology developed here in the U.S. and once manufactured in Warrentown, Va., by InterTechnology/Solar Corp., the company behind the Carter panels.* Roughly three meters long, one meter wide and just 10 centimeters deep, the blue-black panels absorb sunlight to heat water piped through their innards.

The Carter administration set a goal of deriving 20 percent of U.S. energy needs from such renewable sources by the turn of the century. Today, the U.S. gets a mere 7 percent of its energy from renewables, the bulk of that from the massive hydroelectric dams constructed in the middle of the 20th century. Solar thermal and photovoltaic technology combined provide less than 0.1 percent. By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers. "The Department of Energy has a multibillion-dollar budget, in excess of $10 billion," Reagan said during an election debate with Carter, justifying his opposition to the latter's energy policies. "It hasn't produced a quart of oil or a lump of coal or anything else in the line of energy." And in 1986 the Reagan administration quietly dismantled the White House solar panel installation while resurfacing the roof. "Hey! That system is working.

Why don't you keep it?" recalls mechanical engineer Fred Morse, now of Abengoa Solar, who helped install the original solar panels as director of the solar energy program during the Carter years and then watched as they were dismantled during his tenure in the same job under Reagan. "Hey! This whole [renewable] R&D program is working, why don't you keep it?" After they came down it took a soft-spoken administrator from a small environmental college in Maine to rescue the Carter panels from being a forgotten curiosity stored in the dark corner of a vast government warehouse. A long, strange trip In 1991 Peter Marbach was newly minted development director at Unity College in Maine, which was facing a severe budget crisis. Marbach needed to find a way to bring attention—and hopefully donations—to the struggling college and its mission: environmental education. Leafing through a magazine, he stumbled across a picture. "There was this photograph of the solar panels, but they were all sort of disheveled and sort of tossed in a corner in this government service warehouse in Franconia, Virginia," he recalls.

"It was just such a waste." Marbach, lithe from years of mountain climbing and other outdoor pursuits, seems slow to anger, but his eyes, crinkled at the edges from years of smiling, still flash when asked to recollect what inspired his rescue mission. Yet he doesn't sound angry, so much as bemused. "It was in that instant where I was just so filled with anger and disappointment that: How could this happen?" he says. "Wouldn't it be something if I could somehow find a way to get these panels and resurrect them?" Marbach wrote to former President Carter, who wrote back: "It would please me very much to see those panels in use again." He also enlisted the aid of Maine's former U.S. senator, William Cohen. Armed with Carter's letter and Cohen's support he contacted the General Services Administration —the independent government agency that is landlord to other government agencies and generally runs the physical stuff of government. The GSA determined Unity was eligible as an institution of higher learning to take the panels for an administrative fee of $500. The panels weighed more than 45 kilograms each and there were 32 of them.

Marbach just had a battered, blue school bus that was mostly used to carry the school soccer team to away games nearby. "The soccer coach was giving me a hard time," Marbach chuckles as he remembers. "He said, 'You realize that if you take that bus and drive it down there I have no excuse to ask the administration to get us a new bus because that will prove the bus can go that far.'" Marbach pressed on, stripping the seats out of the bus to make room for his cargo and enduring a bumpy and loud trip down the eastern seaboard. Once in Virginia, he pulled up to the grounds of a federal warehouse he describes as much like the fictional one used to store the Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones movie, "just bigger" and stacked with unused furniture and crates of office supplies rather than mysterious archaeological artifacts. A golf cart and an attendant drove Marbach through the cavernous space, where he found the solar panels in a dim corner gathering dust instead of sunlight. Some were broken. "It just looked like there was not a lot of thought given to taking care of these things," Marbach says. A new dawn?

There was a lot of thought given to installing the 32 solar panels in the first place, not least because the system could not alter the look or profile of the White House in any way. In fact, Morse, who first got involved with solar during the Nixon administration by being asked to assess its potential, spent years determining what could be installed. Ultimately, he had to make parts of the panels white, rather than a darker (more sunlight-absorbent) color. On June 30, 1979, the panels were unveiled, although they remained invisible from the ground. "It was the oil shock that pretty much caused the government to take a very serious look at its domestic solar resource," recalls Abengoa's Morse, who has spent decades aiding and abetting the still fledgling solar thermal industry both in government and out. "The motivation was energy independence," a motive that remains recognizable in political rhetoric today because, as Carter himself put it, the sun cannot be embargoed, referring to the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo. "We have this big solar resource, we should use it," Morse explains.

Carter was the first president to take that idea seriously , warming the reviewing stand for his inauguration on January 20, 1977 with the sun's heat harvested by roughly 1,000 square meters of solar thermal panels, according to Morse. "President Carter saw [solar] as a really valid energy resource, and he understood it. I mean, it is a domestic resource and it is huge," Morse recalls, although he admits the inaugural solar system left some chilly. "It was the symbolism of the president wanting to bring solar energy immediately into his administration." That symbolism became more concrete in the form of a vastly increased budget for energy technology research and development (pdf)—levels still unmatched by succeeding administrations—and tax credits for installing wind turbines or solar power that caused a first boom in renewable energy installation. In a sense alternative energy was finally getting the same government support used to develop and maintain other energy technologies, such as oil drilling or nuclear power . "It did not take long for the U.S. government to realize that energy was a great national interest and subsidize it," Morse notes. But the real symbolism was the Carter family using hot water heated by the sun for some of their daily activities.

"It was used for the cafeteria, in the laundry and other parts of the White House," Morse says. That was symbolism that Morse suggests the Reagan administration did not support as wholeheartedly. "We had a new administration that really did not like renewables very much. I don't know if you remember those days when it was called alternative energy and there was something about 'alternative' that did not sit very well." So when the time came to resurface the roof, the panels were taken down. "It was working fine, but the decision was it was not cost-effective." Where they ended up Morse still has no idea. Driving the future In fact, since 1992 16 of the 32 solar panels have been on the Unity College cafeteria roof, located just 15 minutes from the often overcast coast of Maine, warming water in summer and winter. The rest went back into storage, too big to fit in an area that is much smaller than the White House roof.

Once Marbach arrived back at the college, donations flooded in to help refurbish and install them, including a gift of $150,000 worth of pre–Mobil merger Exxon stock, money from actress Glenn Close and a mention by Al Gore during a campaign stop in Maine that year. "From around the country, we just got lots of letters, phone calls of support, and it just sort of restarted the whole conversation about alternative energy," Marbach recalls. "Imagine where we would be today if those panels were left there, if the Reagan administration had continued the funding." Instead, it is countries such as Germany and Japan that have taken the lead as far as developing and deploying solar photovoltaics, whereas Italy and Spain now dominate solar-thermal technology, as evidenced by Morse's employment at a Spain-based solar company building power plants in Arizona. "We look[ed] for the bright red spots of high [solar] intensity [in the satellite data] and then we carefully searched for a farmer who wanted to sell his land," Morse says of the Solana concentrating solar-power plant , currently under construction southwest of Phoenix.

"What is nice about a farm is that it is previously disturbed land…and we will use less than 20 percent of what the farmer used for water." And it is China that has taken the lead when it comes to using the sun to heat hot water for daily use, installing roughly two thirds of total global capacity. "In the U.S. everyone already has a hot water system heated by natural gas, oil or electricity," explains physicist C. Julian Chen of Columbia University, who helped arrange the donation of the Carter panel to the Chinese people. "More than 80 percent of Chinese people do not have hot water; they need it. If you start from scratch, the solar water heater is cheaper." That has made companies like Himin very successful and has cut energy use in cities such as Rizhao—attempting to become carbon neutra l—by a third. And Himin's Huang helped author a 2005 Chinese law that calls for 10 percent of Chinese energy to come from renewable resources by 2020—reminiscent of the policies laid out by Carter in a speech on April 18, 1977.

Already, China derives nearly 10 percent of its energy from renewable resources, primarily hydropower such as the Three Gorges Dam, although it led the world in installing wind turbines in 2009. In the U.S. some activists have called on the Obama administration to bring solar back to the White House roof—and solar company Sungevity has offered to install 102 of its photovoltaic panels for free . "I think Barack Obama knows this problem, and he tries to correct that historical mistake," Chen says. "He appointed Steven Chu as energy secretary, and Steven Chu is a well-known supporter of renewable energy." Of course, solar panels back atop the White House remain merely a symbolic step toward renewable energy. Already, certain buildings on the grounds of the federal landmark employ solar power, courtesy of the National Park Service and President George W. Bush. Yet, the U.S. invests only $5 billion yearly on energy research and development at present—roughly one seventh what China spent last year—and private industry has never filled the gap.

And it would take producing roughly a square meter of photovoltaic panels or the mirrors for a solar thermal system every few seconds for the next 40 years to harvest one terawatt of energy from the sun by 2050—using present technologies—according to engineer Saul Griffith of Other Lab in San Francisco. The U.S. presently uses almost four terawatts of energy a year. In fact, heating hot water alone accounts for 17 percent of U.S. energy use, according to the DoE. Carter's panels no longer cut into Unity's energy budget; the panels operations were shut down in 2005 and the college has donated three to various institutions since 2007, one at time—and plans more donations in future. "We are discussing seriously within our community what the long-term disposition of those panels will be," says Mark Tardif, a spokesman for Unity College. For the moment, most still sit on the cafeteria roof. "They are probably going to come down from that location, probably by the end of summer." Regardless of their ultimate fate, it took the pluck and initiative of one man to rescue the Carter White House solar panels from the dustbin of political and ecological history.

"There was a lot of sweat, a lot of dirt, a lot of struggle, but still just to have your hands on a piece of history and to know that, okay, these things are not going to be just a relic," Marbach recalls. "We were actually going to be able to resurrect them." And those solar-thermal collectors also symbolize an alternative history. "We certainly didn't address the oil and energy issues going back to when Carter tried," Tardif says. "Maybe it would be different if Americans understood what actually happened. We were poised to achieve 20 percent renewables by 2000. What happened?" *Correction (8/6/10): This sentence was edited after posting. It originally stated that the White House solar panels were manufactured by Heliodyne Solar Hot Water. Editor's Note: David Biello is the host of a forthcoming series on PBS, titled Beyond the Light Switch . The series will explore the coming transformation of how we use and produce electricity, along with its impact on the environment, national security and the economy. He conducted the interviews for this article in conjunction with his work on that series.

Bill Press: Reagan Removed Solar Panels from White House Because He was Climate Change Skeptic Bill Press: Reagan Removed Solar Panels from White House Because He was Climate Change Skeptic By Jack Coleman | May 15, 2014 | 8:20 PM EDT 0 shares Don't you love it when liberals look back through history? Who knows what novel interpretations will follow! Radio host and former California Democratic Party chief Bill Press provided a stellar example of this while talking about the decades-long alleged imminent threat posed by climate change, previously known as global warming until the climate characteristically refused to cooperate. (Audio after the jump) Press on his radio show Monday was talking with Evan McMorris-Santoro, Buzzfeed's White House reporter, about President Obama placing solar panels on the roof of the White House, when Press made a claim that can charitably be described as beyond dubious (audio) -- PRESS: And by the way, I watched the video, if you go to Whitehouse.gov, the official White House website, there's a great video on the installation.

It shows them putting them in, drilling down to the concrete and the whole thing, it has a big explanation and the White House usher talks about it, the Secretary of Energy is in the video. And this is something, there were solar panels on the White House and Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter installed them first. Ronald Reagan didn't like them, he didn't believe in climate change, he took them off the White House. MCMORRIS-SANTORO: Right. Well, half right, which is far better than usual when it comes to liberal radio. Yes, Reagan removed the solar panels -- in 1986, two years before the term "global warming" entered the lexicon during a blistering heat wave in the summer of 1988, and six years before publication of Al Gore's bedwetter tome, "Earth in the Balance." To the extent that climate change was a concern in 1981 when Reagan took office, it wasn't warming that was feared -- it was global cooling . Turns out the climate proved less than cooperative on that prophecy too.

Carter installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the White House in June 1979, just before his summer of malaise, fittingly enough. It didn't take long for the gesture to be perceived as little more than symbolic. In an October 2010 post at FoxNews.com, Reagan biographer Craig Shirley cites this lede from an April 1979 Associated Press story that ran in the Washington Post -- A new solar hot water heating system being installed at the White House costs thousands of dollars more than the original estimate and it probably won't pay for itself in energy savings, officials said. Shirley's post also cited many of Carter's unpopular energy policies that helped keep his time in office to a minimum. They included -- -- tax credits for wood-burning stoves. -- closing off exploration for oil and gas in western states and Alaska. -- a proposed new federal tax of 50 cents per gallon of gas. -- creation of the vast pointless bureaucracy known as the Department of Energy. -- oil companies ordered to stop refining gasoline and refine home heating oil instead.

-- a widely-ignored executive order that air conditioning in the private sector should not be lowered below 78 degrees in summer, nor heat raised above 66 degrees in winter. -- "inducements" offered for companies to switch from oil and natural gas to coal. -- a proposal that banks not grant mortgages to home buyers until the federal government certified that a house was properly insulated. Reagan saw the solar panels installed by Carter for what they were, a public relations stunt, and ordered them dismantled. But in a curious parallel with the current occupant of the White House, the panels weren't actually removed until 1986, five years after Reagan took office. Obama assumed office in 2009, and his order for solar panels atop the White House is taking effect five years into his presidency. Then as now, getting things done within government itself proceeds at a glacial pace. Obama Administration Becomes The Third To Install Solar Panels On White House Grounds Deputy Climate Editor at @ThinkProgress, freelancer for @audubonsociety, @universityofga alum. Email me at kvalentine@americanprogress.org.

Aug 15, 2013 Obama Administration Becomes The Third To Install Solar Panels On White House Grounds The White House will soon be one of the newest — and certainly most high profile — home in D.C. with solar panels. A White House official confirmed to the Washington Post Thursday that installation had begun on fitting the President’s residence with solar panels, an effort the official said was “part of an energy retrofit that will improve the overall energy efficiency of the building.” The panels will be American-made , though the official did not confirm which company they would be purchased from. The Obama administration announced in Oct. 2010 that it would install 20 to 50 solar panels on the residence after a campaign headed by 350.org and solar company Sungevity urged the president, along with other world leaders, to add solar panels to government buildings. On Thursday, 350.org leader Bill McKibben commended the president on the move, despite the nearly three years it took for installation to begin. “Better late than never — in truth, no one should ever have taken down the panels Jimmy Carter put on the roof way back in 1979,” McKibben said.

“But it’s very good to know that once again the country’s most powerful address will be drawing some of that power from the sun.” Jimmy Carter installed 32 solar panels on the White House roof when he was president in the late 1970s. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, one of his first actions as president was to have the panels, which his chief-of-staff allegedly said Reagan felt were “just a joke,” removed. The panels ended up at Unity College in Maine, where they were installed on the roof of the school’s cafeteria. But as famous as the Carter installation — and subsequent Reagan removal — was, it was George W. Bush administration that installed the first active solar electric system at the White House (Carter’s panels were largely symbolic, though they were used for heating water ). In 2002, multiple solar grids were installed on the White House grounds. The installation was done quietly, with far less fanfare than Carter’s , but the panels provided energy to several White House operations. According to a New York Times article from 2003, “a grid of 167 solar panels on the roof of a maintenance shed has been delivering electricity to the White House grounds.

Another solar installation has been helping to provide hot water. Yet another has been keeping the water warm in the presidential pool.” It’s unclear still how much power the Obama administration’s solar panels will provide to the White House, but the White House official said the panels will help which will help “demonstrate that historic buildings can incorporate solar energy and energy efficiency upgrades,” and that the panels are estimated to pay for themselves in energy savings within eight years. Obama pledged during his June climate speech at Georgetown University that the federal government would consume 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, and admittedly, 20 to 50 solar panels won’t contribute a substantial amount to that goal. But the administration’s decision to begin installation now is well-timed: a new report has found Americans who want to install solar power on their households are facing record-low costs, so Americans who might be inspired to install solar panels themselves can do so historically inexpensively. White House solar panels being installed this week - The Washington Post White House solar panels being installed this week The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published.

You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set! After nearly three years, the White House began installing solar panels on the First Family's residence this week, a White House official confirmed Thursday. (Haraz N. Ghanbari - AP) The Obama administration had pledged in October 2010 to put solar panels on the White House as a sign of the president's commitment to renewable energy . The White House official, who asked not to be identified because the installation is in process, wrote in an e-mail the project is "a part of an energy retrofit that will improve the overall energy efficiency of the building." At the time of the 2010 announcement, then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu and White House Council on Environmental Quality chair Nancy Sutley said the administration would conduct a competitive bidding process to buy between 20 and 50 solar panels.

The officials did not identify the supplier or cost of the project, but wrote the White House "has begun installing American-made solar panels" and the initiative, "which will help demonstrate that historic buildings can incorporate solar energy and energy efficiency upgrades, is estimated to pay for itself in energy savings over the next eight years." The retrofit also includes installing updated building controls and variable speed fans, the official added. Back in 2010, Chu said, "This project reflects President Obama's strong commitment to U.S. leadership in solar energy and the jobs it will create here at home. Deploying solar energy technologies across the country will help America lead the global economy for years to come." This is not the first time solar panels have graced the White House's roof: President Jimmy Carter had 32 installed in the late 1970s to provide hot water, but President Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986. Then in 2003 President George W. Bush installed a photovoltaic system on a maintenance building and two solar thermal units. The system heated the White House swimming pool. Two grass-roots campaigns lobbied Obama at the start of his first term to restore solar panels to the roof.

On Thursday, climate activist Bill McKibben, whose group 350.org had organized one of the campaigns to install solar power at the White House, welcomed the news that the installation had begun. "Better late than never--in truth, no one should ever have taken down the panels Jimmy Carter put on the roof way back in 1979," he said. "But it's very good to know that once again the country's most powerful address will be drawing some of that power from the sun." In 1979, Carter had predicted the solar water heater on the White House grounds will "either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people." Because of improvements in technology, the price of solar panels has dropped 97 percent since then, and now the solar industry employs more than 120,000 people and generates enough electricity to power more than 1.3 million American homes, according to Rhone Resch of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

The vast majority of the solar panels Carter installed went to Unity College in Maine, where 16 of them were used on the college's cafeteria to heat water and others were placed in storage. One is at Carter's presidential library in Atlanta, Ga., while another is at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. Three years ago Unity College gave one of the solar panels to the People of China, and Unity students have restored other panels in its energy labs that are now out on loan. Two Swiss filmmakers chronicled the Carter solar panels' fate in the film, " A Road Not Taken ." The Obama administration has already undertaken a number of measures to increase the federal government's energy efficiency and use of renewable energy while cutting greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change, a plan the president outlined in an executive order he signed in October 2009. The administration has doubled the number of hybrid cars and truck in the federal fleet, increased the government’s use of renewable energy to 7 percent, cut the federal government's greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent and committed $2 billion to upgrade federal buildings' energy efficiency through contracting requirements at no up-front cost to taxpayers.

So far these measures have collectively saved 7 million gallons of gas and been equivalent to permanently removing 1.5 million cars from the road, according to the White House. Obama has set a new goal of having 20 percent of the federal government's energy use come from renewable power by 2020, which includes the Army, Navy, and Air Force deploying a combined 3 gigawatts of renewable energy by the end of the decade. Reagan’s Road to Climate Perdition – Consortiumnews Reagan’s Road to Climate Perdition January 29, 2012 Exclusive: History can be seen as crossroads where people pick paths and live with the consequences, with some paths leading to grave dangers. Election 1980 was one such crossroad as Americans made the feel-good choice of Ronald Reagan over the eat-your-peas option of Jimmy Carter — taking a path to climate catastrophe, says Sam Parry. By Sam Parry The documentary “ A Road Not Taken ” chronicles the story of the 32 solar panels that President Jimmy Carter installed on the roof of the White House in 1979, the same solar panels President Ronald Reagan unceremoniously removed.

After being taken down in 1986, the solar panels were stored away in a government warehouse, like that scene at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” They were mostly forgotten until 1991, when Unity College, a small private school in central Maine that promotes sustainability, acquired them and put them to use on the roof of the school’s cafeteria. Later, one of the panels was donated to the American History Museum in Washington, DC, and another found its way back to Jimmy Carter, given to the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia, where it was made a permanent exhibit in 2007 , recalling Carter’s early commitment to renewable energy. President Jimmy Carter’s solar panels being installed Yet, besides following the fate of these particular solar panels, the 2010 documentary reflects on the lost opportunity for the United States and the world in the change of direction that the solar panels represented, the fateful turn on energy issues from Carter’s presidency to Reagan’s.

The documentary depicts the 1979 installation of the solar panels to heat water for the staff cafeteria at the White House as one of the most visible symbols of the energy policies of the Carter administration, which did more than any other before or since to promote the goals of alternative energy and conservation. And, for Carter, the dual causes of renewable energy and energy independence were always high on his agenda. In early February 1977, just two weeks into his presidency, Carter gave a national televised fireside chat, wearing a yellow wool sweater and promoting a national energy policy as a top priority for his administration. Over the next four years, Carter turned this commitment into a multitude of programs and initiatives. Carter created the Department of Energy, taxed oil company profits, improved automobile fuel efficiency, invested heavily in the Solar Energy Research Institute (the precursor to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), cut America’s oil imports in half, and increased U.S. use of renewable energy like solar power with a goal of generating 20 percent of all energy consumed in America from renewable sources by 2000. Carter laid out a route for America’s energy future that — while still needing traditional fossil fuels — promoted cleaner alternatives and conservation.

In his last State of the Union address, given just days before President Reagan’s inauguration, President Carter reflected on what he hoped his legacy would be on this crucial issue of energy: “The Administration’s 1977 National Energy Plan marked an historic departure from the policies of previous Administrations. The plan stressed the importance of both energy production and conservation to achieving our ultimate national goal of relying primarily on secure sources of energy. In 1978, I initiated the Administration’s Solar Domestic Policy Review. This represented the first step towards widespread introduction of renewable energy sources into the Nation’s economy. “As a result of the Review, I issued the 1979 Solar Message to Congress, the first such message in the Nation’s history. The Message outlined the Administration’s solar program and established an ambitious national goal for the year 2000 of obtaining 20 percent of this Nation’s energy from solar and renewable sources. The thrust of the federal solar program is to help industry develop solar energy sources by emphasizing basic research and development of solar technologies which are not currently economic, such as photovoltaics, which generate energy directly from the sun.

“At the same time, through tax incentives, education, and the Solar Energy and Energy Conservation Bank, the solar program seeks to encourage state and local governments, industry, and our citizens to expand their use of solar and renewable resource technologies currently available. As a result of these policies and programs, the energy efficiency of the American economy has improved markedly and investments in renewable energy sources have grown significantly. It now takes 3 1/2 percent less energy to produce a constant dollar of GNP than it did in January 1977. This increase in efficiency represents a savings of over 1.3 million barrels per day of oil equivalent, about the level of total oil production now occurring in Alaska.” However, after Carter was out of the White House, President Reagan not only removed the solar panels from the roof, he systematically dismantled Carter’s alternative energy and conservation initiatives. Reagan became the anti-Carter in almost every way on energy policy. Reagan slashed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s budget by 90 percent, halved the Energy Department’s conservation and alternative fuels budget, eliminated the wind investment tax credit, reduced spending on solar photovoltaic research by two-thirds, slashed energy tax credits for homeowners, and reduced fuel-efficiency standards for cars.

Due largely to Reagan’s policy reversals on alternative energy, the United States fell far short of Carter’s goal of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2000, achieving about only one-quarter of that target, even less than what Carter’s policies had achieved by the early 1980s. In retrospect, it is clear that Reagan made reckless policy choices that had grave consequences for American energy security, for the environment and for the future survivability of life on planet Earth. Indeed, for those who understand the dire threat of catastrophic climate change and the curse of America’s continued addiction to fossil fuels, “A Road Not Taken” can be a painful documentary to watch. It may be even more painful for our kids and grandkids to watch this film in a world that already is on its way to 11 degrees F warming (or more) by the end of the century. Scratch that. It won’t be painful to watch a movie. It will be painful to live in such a world. But first, some good news. America is currently in the midst of a mini-boom for renewable energy, the likes of which we haven’t seen since, well, the Carter administration.

In 2010, 8.21 percent of all energy consumed in America came from renewable energy — i.e. not fossil fuels and not nuclear. That’s up from 5.37 percent in 2001. [See U.S. Energy Information Administration .] Yet, before we start patting ourselves on the back, it should be noted that President Carter’s energy policies (along with the oil crises of the 1970s) helped get the United States to 8.9 percent renewable in 1983. And all the way back in 1949, renewables accounted for 9.3 percent of our total energy consumption. So, the United States is not yet back to where it was in 1983 or 1949, but at least the nation finally is turning back onto the right road. The only question is, after such a long delay, is there any chance of getting to a carbon-free world — or even a low-carbon world — in time to avert the devastating threat of runaway global warming? The hard truth is the answer is probably not. It’s hard to write those words. I have kids.

I’d like to have a greater sense of hope. But I’ve read the science. Runaway global warming means the destruction of life as we have known it, probably not the destruction of all life on Earth, but the words “global catastrophe” is a soft way of putting it. Human civilization’s inability to seriously confront this crisis is akin to knowing that a giant meteor is on a collision course with Earth in 50 to 100 years and doing nothing about it — besides questioning the mathematics that charts the trajectory of the meteor. Without doubt, the reality of climate change is difficult for people to accept. Numerous studies have examined the human mind to try to understand why we don’t take seriously the demise of our entire way of life. These studies have achieved some interesting — though ultimately not very helpful — insights. Harvard Psychology Professor Daniel Gilbert has noted that global warming is not intentional, immoral, imminent or instantaneous, but that only makes it more insidious. “Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it sneaks in under the radar that we’ve evolved,” Gilbert said.

At least that helps explain why, as Elizabeth Kolbert, journalist for The New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, puts it, “a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself.” But analysis is not action. And we need all-out action now. If you want to get a sense of what a planet that is 11°F warmer will look like, consider this: The planet has already warmed about 1.4°F since the Industrial Revolution. This level of warming has done this to the world’s glaciers: And it’s done this to Arctic sea ice: And it’s helped cause our seas to rise this much: This is what the warming looks like: But that’s nothing compared to what’s in store. At 11°F warming, the climate of New Hampshire looks something like the climate of the Carolinas . At 11°F warming, we’ll be measuring sea level rise in feet and meters, not inches and centimeters. At 11°F warming, you can no longer grow corn in Iowa and the number of people around the world dying from starvation every year will increase from millions to hundreds of millions, possibly billions.

The crisis won’t be something that can be addressed through benefit concerts or even government aid programs. We will be facing a permanent dust bowl across most of the western half the U.S. — from Kansas to California. A third of Florida will be under water. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of people around the world becoming environmental refugees. We’re talking about Mad Max doomsday time. Why will this happen? Well, the physics are actually pretty straight-forward. Carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. We’re emitting around 33.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for decades. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has increased from pre-industrial levels of around 280 parts per million (ppm) to about 392 ppm today. We’re adding roughly 2 ppm per year to that total. And, in spite of the mountain of scientific warnings over the last 30 years, instead of reducing our CO2 emissions, we’re increasing them. On our current path, the planet will get warmer and warmer and warmer and warmer with virtually no end in sight. It couldn’t be more straight-forward. There are no real questions about the physics.

But national and global policies are not made in the realm of physics or science. They are made in the realm of politics. And when it comes to politics, especially modern U.S. politics, it is infinitely easier to do nothing than to take even the smallest steps toward doing the right thing, especially when billions of dollars in profits from fossil fuel corporate behemoths are at stake. Especially when to this day you can go on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh’s radio show — or even some of the so-called left-wing chat shows — and demonstrate how witty you are as you chuckle at Jimmy Carter’s yellow wool cardigan sweater and his roof-top solar panels. As a nation, the United States may finally be turning back onto Jimmy Carter’s road to renewables, but the painful reality is it may be too late. The three-decade detour begun by Ronald Reagan — and the continued slow pace of action even today — may guarantee that the road the United States remains on is the road to climate perdition. White House Solar Panels: What Ever Happened To Carter's Solar Thermal Water Heater? (VIDEO) | The Huffington Post White House Solar Panels: What Ever Happened To Carter's Solar Thermal Water Heater?

(VIDEO) 02/27/2009 05:12 am ET | Updated May 25, 2011 540 Dave Burdick Man about Boulder: dailycamera.com, biggreenboulder.com, fridayallweek.com President Obama's first days in office have been chock full of reversing the actions of the previous president, from halting midnight environmental regulations to taking steps toward closing the Guantanamo Bay prison site. It reminds me of another famous undoing, and raises a question: What happened to the solar panels that President Jimmy Carter had put on the White House and President Ronald Reagan had removed? Well, it turns out someone's making a documentary for me all about that. See the description and trailer below. In 1979, Jimmy Carter, in a forward-looking move, installed solar panels in the roof of the White House. This symbolic installation was taken down in 1986 during the Reagan presidency. In 1991, Unity College, an environmentally centered college in Maine acquired the panels and later installed them on their cafeteria.

In "A Road not Taken", swiss artists Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller travel back in time and, following the route the panels took, interview those involved in the solar panel decisions, in the oil crisis of the time, and in the way that that moment presaged our own era. The documentary essay is still in work and will be about 70 minutes long. BUT WAIT... THEY'RE ON A CAFETERIA? Yes! Unity College considered auctioning off the White House solar panels (and donated one panel to Carter's presidential library ( PDF ). We had mistakenly reported that the panels were sold, but a Unity College representative helpfully wrote in to say the panels were still there, just not in service anymore. And they attached this photo: SOLAR NOW?

Days of 'Malaise' and Jimmy Carter's Solar Panels | Fox News Days of 'Malaise' and Jimmy Carter's Solar Panels By Craig Shirley Facebook 0 Twitter 0 livefyre Email Print “A new solar hot water heating system being installed at the White House costs thousands of dollars more that the original estimate and it probably won’t pay for itself in energy savings, officials said.” So went the lede of a story in the Associated Press and reprinted in the Washington Post on April 6th, 1979 about President Jimmy Carter’s newest public relations stunt in the midst of the energy crisis. This was on the heels of lowering the thermostats in the White House, and later in the year, turning off the White House Christmas lights to show his concern over energy usage while also claiming he did so to show support for the hostages being held in Tehran by the Ayatollah Khomeini.

In Carterland, this was seen as a public relations “twofer.” Voltaire once said, “History is a pack of lies, agreed upon.” Truer words were never spoken, especially over the current handwringing by environmentalists and liberal revisionists as to why Ronald Reagan had the useless solar panels and endless pipes removed when he became president. Revisionist history is current attempting to portray Carter as a forward looking environmentalist and Reagan as some cold hearted capitalist but as a matter of fact, in another public relations initiative, the 39th president also proposed tax credits for wood burning stoves. One can imagine a denuded American continent, bereft of any trees because Americans had cut down all the forests. Environmentalists tend to be silly people and a favored bumper sticker at the time proudly proclaimed, “Split Wood, Not Atoms.” The Associated Press story elaborated, as unnamed White House officials called the solar panels an “economic dog.” Carter’s cousin, Hugh Carter, was in charge of the parsimous Georgian’s White House, but with Jimmy Carter, public relations often seemed to trump good policy, even spending policy.

Several of Carter’s energy initiatives included closing off exploration for oil and gas in Alaska and western states, proposing time and again a new federal tax of 50 cents per gallon on gasoline, and the creation of the Department of Energy, one of the great government boondoggles of all time, whose goal was to solve the energy crisis. Americans have only been waiting for a little over thirty years to figure out the real mission of the DOE. During his time of office, he ordered the oil companies to stop refining gasoline and instead refine home heating oil for a coming winter. The order resulted in gasoline lines that snaked around gas stations across the country. In many places including Northern Virginia, fist fights broke out among furious drivers. Rationing policies were initiated by many states, some based on Social Security numbers, others based on “odd” or “even” license plates, but these were obviously easy to beat. And often were. Americans became especially furious when they learned the Congress had it very own gas station, which was selling the then precious liquid for much less than the taxpayers were shelling out.

At his inaugural, Carter had arranged for “solar reflectors” to keep those in the reviewing stand warm, but according to The Economist, “electric heaters will be ready in case the sun fails to shine.” At one point, Carter issued an Executive Order directing the private sector not to lower their air conditioning below 78 degrees in the summer nor raise their heat above 66 degrees in the winter. Across the country, the order was ignored. However, he did propose “inducements” to force industrial America to switch from oil and natural gas to coal. Conservationists now routinely denounce coal. He also proposed at one point that mortgages not be granted to home buyers until the federal government has certified the home was sufficiently insulated. Americans who did voluntarily cut their electricity usage found to their horror that their bills actually had gone up, a cruel reminder of how economics works. Carter also proclaimed May 3 as “National Sun Day” and pressed for the creation of a Administration official to boost solar poer whose job title only lacked the title “Czar.” In Los Angeles, a race between solar cars took place, but it was never reported if any of them actually finished the contest.

The solar panels were originally “supposed to cost” the taxpayers “$24,000 to install and would cut utility bills by $1,000 a year to start.” Imagine that. Carter’s plan was for the panels to pay for themselves in 24 years! Even that platy went awry however, as Cousin Hugh could not find anyone to install them for less than $28,000 and, to accommodate the ugly White Elephant, another $7,000 would have to be spent tearing up the White House roof! In spite of all the arguments against the useless panels, Carter had the contraption installed anyway, a monument to the fecklessness of his so-called conservation policies. Washingtonians laughed, “There he goes again.” Government officials---including Carter---actually discussed regulations to control access to the sun. Early in his term, Carter sat before a roaring fire dressed in a sweater, calling on the American people to sacrifice and conserve energy. He called his campaign the “Moral Equivalent Of War,” but Americans felled to laugher when they realized the acronym of Carter’s plan.

After the sweater incident, he picked up the nickname, “Jimmy Cardigan.” Anyone who knows about fireplaces will tell you that an open fire in a hearth sucks all the heat out of a building leaving it colder that it would have without the fire in the first place. But that night, it did make a pretty television shot for the president. There was no energy crisis. There was a crisis of harebrained government regulators, interfering with the free market, who created the problems in the first place. In the 1840’s, Charles Dickens visited Washington. Unimpressed with the city and the government, he sniffed, “Few people would live in Washington, I take it, who were not obliged to live there.” The current occupant of the White House is fearful of unfavorable comparisons to Carter, but at least the Carters chose to send their daughter Amy to the public schools in the District. After becoming president in January of 1981, one of Ronald Reagan’s first orders was to decontrol the price of gasoline. Nervous editorialists warned darkly that this would send prices skyrocketing, but the economics major from Eureka College knew something about supply and demand.

In fact, the price of gasoline fell, supplies became plentiful and in 29 years, there has never been a gas line in America. Craig Shirley is president of Shirley & Banister Public Affairs and has written two books on Ronald Reagan, including his newest, "Rendezvous With Destiny" (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2009). He is now working on a political biography of Newt Gingrich . Follow Fox News Opinion on Facebook and Twitter ! Advertisement

Question: What were installed on the White House roof by Jimmy Carter (but removed by Ronald Reagan)?
Answer: Solar Panels