Jimmy Carter's solar panels help power a Maine college, then star in film

By Beth Daley, Globe Staff

You may not remember this but in 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House West Wing.

The panels, which were used to heat water for the staff eating area, were a symbol of a new solar strategy that Carter said was going to "move our nation toward true energy security and abundant, readily available energy supplies."

But in 1986, President Ronald Reagan took the solar panels down when the White House roof was being repaired. They were never reinstalled.

From the film A Road Not Taken

In 1990, the panels were retrieved from government storage and brought to the environmentally-minded Unity College about an hour southeast of Bangor, Maine. There, with help from Academy Award winning actress Glenn Close, the panels were refurbished and used to heat water in the cafeteria until 2005. They are still there, although they don't work anymore.

Now, a documentary film has been made about the panels, using them as a backdrop to explore American oil dependency and the political lack of will to pursue alternative energy. Swiss directors Christina Hemaner and Roman Keller follow the route of the panels in the hour-long film "A Road Not Taken."

In the movie, the two took one solar panel from Unity, placed it in the back of two students' 1990 Dodge Ram pick-up truck that was retrofitted to run on vegetable oil and delivered it to the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum in Atlanta. Keller was even able to hook up the solar panel to the pick-up truck to heat hot water for a shower before the institution took formal possession of the panel last year.