Displayed on a pedestal on the campus of Unity College in Waldo County, there’s a glass-covered gray rectangle, about the size of a picnic table. Unity College natural resources professor Doug Fox says it’s an important part of history.
“This is a solar panel that Jimmy Carter installed on the White House,” Fox says. “Unity College has a couple of dozen of these and this is the one that we have on display here.”
Solar power is experiencing an unprecedented boom in the U.S. This relic of its origins, not far from what will be the largest solar project in Maine, illustrates how American solar energy has evolved by fits and starts, over decades.
This story is part of our series “Climate Driven: A deep dive into Maine’s response, one county at a time.”
If the solar panel could talk, it would tell a story of grand ambition. President Jimmy Carter unveiled the 32 solar panels on June 20, 1979, not to fight climate change, but to reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil during the energy crisis.
“I think all of us working together, can assure the success of what is being initiated this afternoon, a national program supported and enjoyed by all Americans, to make solar energy a clean, sure, economical, exciting part of Americans’ lives,” Carter said at a press conference, on that bright June day.
Carter also proposed a $100 million solar energy bank as a step toward a goal of generating 20% of America’s energy from renewable sources by the year 2000. But the vision was dimmed by Carter’s successor, President Ronald Reagan, who removed the panels during a White House renovation.
A decade later, a team from Unity College pulled the seats out of an old school bus, drove to DC, and rescued the panels from obscurity in a government warehouse. They installed 16 of them on a roof at the college, to heat water for the dining hall.
Murray Carpenter
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Maine Public
A file photo from when Chinese entrepreneur Huang Ming flew to Unity in 2010 to retrieve a solar panel to be the centerpiece of a museum in his massive development known as the Solar Valley.
The panels were so well-known in solar circles that the Chinese entrepreneur Huang Ming flew to Unity in 2010 to retrieve one to be the centerpiece of a museum in his massive development known as the Solar Valley. As he formally accepted the panel, Huang noted that Americans had pioneered the development of solar energy, but had turned away from it.
“We have learned a lot from you, from your technology, your books, from your scholars,” he said. “But after energy crisis, in the Reagan presidency, you throw away everything.”
Other panels went to the Carter Center in Georgia, and to the Smithsonian’s National Museum …….