President Carter was the first to put solar panels on the White House — Reagan removed them 7 years later

Though arguably more shocking to the American public then versus now, as anyone who queued up in their giant sedan blocks away from 1970s gas stations might recall, Carter’s crisis had similar characteristics to today’s climate of high food prices and oil and gas
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uncertainty. The energy crimp was brought on by what the West considers to be Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.

By many accounts, although altered somewhat with the benefit of hindsight, it was the energy and inflation crisis that cost Carter his second term.

The solar panels installed in the White House in the 1970s may be long gone, but its current occupant, President Joe Biden, a Democrat like Carter, has also leveraged the notion of U.S.-made protection from flighty foreign energy reliance to push energy and climate-change policy. In what some have deemed the largest climate change-focused law to date, Biden used last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) to push for at-scale solar, wind
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nuclear, carbon capture and other cleaner alternatives.

Read: Carbon capture, nuclear and hydrogen feature in most net-zero emissions plans and need greater investment: report

In fact, the IRA includes rebates for home and business solar installations (you can read up on the federal program, including savings amounts, on the Department of Energy’s EnergyStar site).

Read: Want a rebate to upgrade home electric or swap to solar? There’s good news and bad news

The consumer-level incentives are intended to push the U.S. further along a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Man-made emissions, created when fossil fuels are burned, are blamed for rising, acidic oceans, eroding coastlines, and increasingly severe drought, heat and flooding. Biden’s political foes argue that generating more U.S.-based oil and gas is the key not only to keeping down energy costs, but cutting reliance on Russia and Middle East production, boosting security at the same time.

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But Carter intended to push the U.S. along this path long before 2015’s pivotal Paris Climate Accord, and in the days since Paris, a nearly universal global pledge to sharply reduce emissions. How successful said pledge will be is another story.

A bipartisan past: Nixon’s EPA and Carter’s solar push

On solar installation day in 1979, here’s what Carter predicted at the dedication ceremony, according to a piece recollecting the event in Scientific American: “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.”

The former president, who is 98, is the longest-lived American president. He has had a recent series of short hospital stays. And over the weekend, the Carter Center said in a statement that he has now “decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”

Carter, of course, wasn’t the first president to worry about climate change, or at least devote a degree of attention to the issue.

Notably, in the early 1970s, as a result of heightened public concerns about deteriorating city air, natural areas littered with debris, and urban water supplies contaminated with dangerous impurities, President Richard Nixon, a Republican, presented the House and Senate with a groundbreaking 37-point message on the environment. 

Nixon, who can be credited with the origins of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), eventually signed the clean air and clean water acts into law.

So what happened to Carter’s White House solar panels?

As the 1980s stretched on, President Ronald Reagan, the Republican who enjoyed two terms, had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling separate Department of Energy (DOE) and had eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies.

Reagan recommitted the U.S. to reliance on fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers because the added competition would presumably keep costs down.

“The Department of Energy has a multibillion-dollar budget, in excess of $10 billion,” Reagan said during a 1979 debate with Carter, justifying his opposition to the latter’s energy policies. “It hasn’t produced a quart of oil
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or a lump of coal or anything else in the line of energy.”

By 1986, the Reagan administration had quietly dismantled the White House solar panel installation while resurfacing the roof.

Although the removal didn’t go entirely unnoticed.

“Hey! That system is working. Why don’t you keep it?” recalls mechanical engineer Fred Morse, now of Abengoa Solar, to Scientific American, remembering the job at hand. Morse had 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.

And Morse continued: “The motivation was energy independence,” he told the publication, and solar, as a policy option, certainly remains one solution in areas here enough sun backs reliability. That’s true then and now, particularly as solar has grown more cost-competitive.

It was a justification that remains recognizable in political rhetoric today. As Carter once said, the sun cannot be embargoed, referring to the 1973–74 Arab oil embargo.

One of Carter’s solar panels resides at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, one at the Carter Library and about a decade ago, one joined the collection of the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China.

In China, which competes with the U.S. today in a race toward renewable energy, solar-powered hot-water heats remain common.

During the beginning of the George W. Bush administration in 2003, the National Park Service installed a 9 kilowatt solar electric array on the building maintenance facility, yet it attracted very little media coverage, and the White House itself did not promote the installation. The Bush White House years included two solar thermal systems, one to heat the pool and spa, and the other to provide general hot water for the property.  

President Obama’s Climate Action Plan advanced in 2013 outlined his commitment to using executive orders to cut power plant emissions and slash the federal government’s carbon footprint. Some of the initiatives saw the light of day. The Trump administration largely rolled back most features of the 2013 bill.

The Obama Administration’s own White House solar installation was completed in 2013. The panels, inverter and components were American-made and the installation was considered about the size of an average home solar system in the United States at the time.

A presidency reconsidered?

Carter’s environmental attributes will be debated as his long life is recalled. He did, it must be said, regulate natural gas. That’s a polluting source of energy that because it is much cleaner than coal has come to power much of the U.S. electrical grid in recent decades.

Still, he “inaugurated the nation’s investment in research on solar energy and was one of the first presidents to warn us about the dangers of climate change,” writes Carter biographer Kai Bird, in an op-ed for the New York Times. “He rammed through the Alaska Land Act, tripling the size of the nation’s protected wilderness areas.”

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At a service this weekend in Carter’s Plains, Ga., church, his niece Kim Fuller shared one of her uncle’s quotes. which might be chalked up to his early understanding about the multigenerational fix for climate change or, certainly, service in general.

“I just want to read one of Uncle Jimmy’s quotes,” Fuller said during the Sunday school morning service, adding: “Oh, this is going to be really hard.”

She referenced this quote from Carter: “I have one life and one chance to make it count for something. I’m free to choose that something. … My faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I can, whenever I can, for as long as I can.”

“Maybe if we think about it, maybe it’s time to pass the baton,” Fuller said before leading those gathered in prayer. “Who picks it up, I have no clue. I don’t know. Because this baton’s going to be a really big one.”

Read: Fond remembrances for Jimmy Carter after former president enters hospice

The Associated Press contributed.