Question

what is the summary of panel solar in the white house?

Answer 1

President Jimmy Carter dedicated the solar-thermal panels on the roof of the White House, 20 June 1979.

In 1978, Carter declared a national ‘Sun Day’ on 3 May every year, committing to developing an aggressive policy to harness solar and renewable sources of energy. On a tour of the Solar Energy Research Institute in Colorado, he vowed to install a solar water heater on the roof of the White House and pledged a large increase in funding for solar energy research. True to his promise, Carter had a set of solar-thermal panels installed on the roof of the White House later that year.

The panels incorporated a flat plate solar collector, which used the sun’s energy to heat water, reducing the need for boiler use. Sun light shone onto the absorber plates, heating them up, and transferring this solar energy to water passing behind.

Working perfectly throughout Carter’s remaining years as President, the panels were in use until 1986, when Republican President Ronald Reagan – a sceptic of the energy crisis and of renewable energies – chose not to have them reinstalled after a rooftop resurfacing. The panels were then stored in a federal warehouse until their acquisition by an environmental college in Maine in 1991. The college installed 16 of the panels on the cafeteria roof, with the rest put into storage. Some of the remaining panels have now been acquired by museums – including the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Science and Technology Museum in China. One of the panels was displayed at the Science Museum’s autumn 2018 exhibition, The Sun: Living With Our Star.