from Hacker News

Where did the Carter White House's solar panels go? (2010)

by rndmize on 9/15/23, 10:07 PM with 127 comments

  • by neonate on 9/15/23, 11:18 PM

  • by JKCalhoun on 9/15/23, 11:59 PM

    > 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.

    Crazy. You see all these wind turbines all across the U.S. If not spread across the plains or along foothills, they're being shipped along the highways one blade at a time. I look at the transformation going on and figure we could have had this tech in the 80's. What happened in the last four decades? Talk about a lost generation.

    It was so weird to grow up in the 70's when they were teaching us the Metric System in public schools, when National Parks were adding meters, kilometers to signage. Reusable spacecraft, renewable energy, (and nuclear energy), computers, micro-electronics....

    To be sure there were warnings of an ominous, overcrowded, polluted future ("Soylent Green", "Silent Running", just to call out a couple films of the era) but as a kid I was infused with the optimism of the time. Buckminster Fuller, NASA ... even the hippies and their communes.

    I think I still live in that world in my head. I hope maybe I have expressed a part of that optimism to my kids as I raised them.

  • by elihu on 9/15/23, 11:30 PM

    The thing I didn't know until I came across a similar article posted here on HN a few years ago (maybe it was the same one?) is that the White House panels weren't photovoltaic, they were solar-thermal for heating hot water.

    Basically, Carter wasn't deploying some cutting edge and extravagantly expensive (at the time) technology that could be deployed as a high-profile technical demo but not actually economical to use, he was deploying a cheap, practical technology that could be used on most houses, during warm months at least.

  • by anonu on 9/16/23, 1:57 AM

    We had solar-thermal panels on the roof of our house in Beirut in 1995... they're still going strong - just need to wipe them of dust every now and then. Hands down one of the best home appliance investments - especially in a country where electricity is sporadic.

    The reason they haven't picked up in the US is because infrastructure is good - electricity delivery is reliable. It's much cheaper to install an electrical or gas water heater rather than the complicated plumbing needed to add solar-thermal.