- Sustainability Office
- Jesse Pyles, Sustainability Coordinator
- 207.948.3131 x295
- jpyles@unity.edu
- Unity College Sustainability Monitor
The “Jimmy Carter” Presidential Solar Panels at Unity College
One little-known and unique fact about Unity College is that we are the current home of the famous “Jimmy Carter” Solar Panels.
The panels were placed on the roof of the White House in 1978 and 1979 at President Carter’s order following the important energy speech of April 18, 1977. We “inherited” them in 1992 when a Unity College administrator named Peter Marbach drove our old school bus down to Franconia, VA, to liberate them from a General Services Administration warehouse under the government surplus donations program. They had been in storage since they were removed during the administration of President Reagan in 1986.
There are various myths about their removal. One is that President Reagan's Attorney General Edwin Meese ordered them gone because they gave the wrong impression about America as a superpower. Another is that a leak in the roof needed to be fixed and the panels were never replaced. (Ironically, updated solar water heating and photovoltaic panels were recently placed on buildings adjacent to the White House by the National Park Service, amid a small flurry of publicity and nostalgic memories of the original panels).
We placed 16 of them on our cafeteria roof in 1992, and used them to provide hot water for 12 years. The remainder was placed in storage, although one or two have occasionally been used for student experimentation. And of course, students have always been interested in and concerned about the system.
We would like to retire these panels from active use and instead preserve them as historical artifacts. We would also like to use them to raise money to support our undergraduate environmental degree programs and to purchase replacement renewable power systems in wind, modern solar photovoltaic, and modern solar heating. We have education programs in all these areas, and a much larger college-wide program in sustainability led by our Interim President Dr. Mark Lapping. Unity College now purchases only renewable electricity and has a program to reduce campus energy use overall. With recent improvements in marketing and technology for renewable energy, the Jimmy Carter panels are no longer capable of contributing to energy efficiency on campus, but they are capable of continuing to provide education, memory, and inspiration both here and elsewhere in the nation.
We propose to provide at least one panel, set up as a display with historical information, to the Smithsonian Institution; and others similarly set up, to the Carter Center or Carter Library. We would keep one for ourselves in an outdoor display. Others could be distributed to other important centers for sustainability and energy education, given as gifts to major donors, or sold to collectors to raise money for student projects.
If you are interested in the Jimmy Carter Solar Panels, please call our development office at 207 948 3131 ext 302 or email mwomersley@unity.edu