Perspective on the Carter panels and energy legacy

As our students and Bill McKibben are preparing to make the solar power road trip to DC to try to talk President Obama into recharging the Carter energy legacy, I think it's worth a time out, at least on these pages, to think about this a bit.

How do I feel about the solar power road trip and the Jimmy Carter energy policy legacy?

Understand, Bill's job, and the job of 350.org, is to stir up students and the public in general to push politicians like the President into getting something done.

My job is to think through, and to teach other folks to think though, what actually should be done so that we actually do the right thing, and then, on occasion, to demonstrate the doing of it. I like this job because it suits my personality. I'm very solutions-oriented, and I enjoy technical complexity and analysis. And I'm not unfond of even sometimes stuffing insulation into cracks or connecting the odd solar module or erecting the occasional wind turbine. It's a lot more fun for me and the students than sitting in the office or classroom, and I much prefer my students learn the lesson that ideas are not deeds and that someone always has to translate the one to the other, if anything real is to happen.

But a long time ago I was an activist, like Bill, and a pretty decent one, and ran campaigns and wrote for activist magazines and even once helped lead a campaign that targeted then-President Clinton in much the same kind of way. So I can identify, even if I am not too sure about some of the specifics.

In general, I think it would be a good thing for President Obama to highlight climate change problems and energy solutions, particularly American job-creating energy solutions right now. He has been doing so, with speeches and visits to factories and the like, but it really hasn't broken through the rest of the political noise yet, to penetrate through to the average American, and this needs to happen. Bringing Jimmy Carter's panels back to the White House, even symbolically, might just do this.

I wouldn't be surprised if a few White House staffers aren't sitting around a table right now trying to decide what to do with McKibben and the students when he shows up. On the one hand, the President can't be seen to hob-nob with any activist that gets in a van and takes a drive to see him. That just wouldn't end. But on the other hand, McKibben might just have offered the White House an opportunity, on a plate, to break through the noise and communicate directly with the American people about energy and climate.

(Since at least one of these staffers is one of my former professors, Steve Fetter of the Maryland Policy School, this is an intriguing scene, and ironic, to me personally.)

It would even make sense, to my mind, for President Obama to further endorse solar technology by agreeing to McKibben's request to beef up the White House solar systems. It fits in with the current need to beef up jobs programs, and solar technology is one area within renewable energy that the US has mastered and has numerous patents and other proprietary knowledge. More people need to know about this capability and be proud of it and learn to use it. The time has come to rapidly expand the use of both solar thermal and solar PV in America and the world. Right now, of all the things that we inherited from Jimmy Carter's energy policy legacy, this is a good one to recharge. President Obama could even bring President Carter up for the inaugural ceremony of a new White House solar power system.

That would be a very successful outcome, wouldn't it?

But we'll see, I suppose. Time will tell how successful Bill's trip is. From Bill's point of view, actually, the trip is already successful, since he's already been on Letterman and in USA Today.

Now that that the political/activism discussion is out of the way, lets talk tech, because while I'm interested in the activism, I'd like to offer some smarter suggestions than to just slap solar on the White House willy nilly.

It just doesn't necessarily make much sense to literally "put solar on it," as the road trip's slogan goes, especially if we're talking actually putting PV on the White House, or any historical building.

There's simply no technical need to do this.

One of the nice advantages of photovoltaic systems is that you can step up the voltage, invert it from DC to AC, and transmit it through regular power lines. You can get all the advantages of solar PV by putting the modules in just about any sunny spot you want, and either running the power into the White House if close, or running the power into the grid if further away, and crediting the attributes of that green grid power to the White House account through Renewable Energy Credits or RECs.

Or you can put the modules in your grounds and run it into your building. There is already a solar PV system on a building within the White House complex, the so-called cabana, actually the changing room at the swimming pool. The PV system was placed there in 2002 by the National Park Service, the agency responsible for the White House, and it works and produces a peak output of about 9KW.

That was a good compromise, to put the system on the pool house, not the 210 year-old historical building, and any transmission losses between that building and the main building would be negligible.

This existing system probably only makes a fraction of the power this building needs, though, and could be increased in scale ten-fold.

But I wouldn't put the new panels on the roof of the main building.

If instead of solar PV we're talking solar thermal, particularly solar hot water, it does make sense to put the equipment on the main building. But not PV. There are other choices.

A particularly nice strategy would be to put solar arrays in various places in the grounds or even on the National Mall. To make this work nicely, I would use US-made polycrystaline modules on US-made trackers. This isn't the very latest technology, but it's interesting technology.

Here's an example, the NRG Systems factory in Hinesburg, VT. Full disclosure: NRG supports Unity College. But you could buy someone else's trackers.



Trackers are interesting architecturally, and can be used to enhance a building's grounds or to enhance a public open space. They increase the amount of the sun's rays that can be captured by the panels by following the sun around the sky. One of the technical details about solar power is that the most energy is captured when the sun is hitting the panel directly. Trackers help to do this. They aren't always cost-effective, but they can be. It's fun to watch them follow the sun throughout the day. They make built landscapes come a little more alive. Solar trackers would be very cool around the Ellipse or up and down the Mall.

The very latest technology is of course thin-film or amorphous solar. This is the material that will reboot energy production in the US: the most important and viable new renewable energy tech. But these kinds of modules require even more space. The state of the art is to install them in mass quantity as solar power stations on the roofs of large industrial buildings or in the desert.

Washington DC is definitely a desert for common sense, but it isn't the Mohabe. Space is at a premium and expensive. However, those big old New Deal-era buildings on the National Mall are all solar power stations waiting to happen. Taking a whole bunch of thin-film modules and wiring them up on these buildings would be a nice jobs program for a few hundred electricians and electricians helpers, and a good investment in the technology and in public awareness of the technology to boot.

My third recommendation would involve the main building, or at least the vaunted West Wing. Solar thermal technology, which is what the original Carter Panels were (you'd be amazed how many reporters who contact me don't know the difference or just assume that the Carter Panels were electrical ones), is best installed close to the point of use. It's quite efficient to heat hot water with the sun, but it's not at all efficient to transmit heat energy long distances unless you actually are the sun. (Even that statement is technically incorrect, since what the sun transmits is light energy that the solar thermal panel converts to heat.)

But I wouldn't use Carter era flat plate collectors. There's probably not enough room on the White House to put up enough flat plates to collect enough heat to provide enough hot water for the folks that live and work in the White House.

Plus, it's still a 210 year-old historic building, and we wouldn't be very architecturally or historically sensitive people, were we to clutter it up with a lot of solar collectors.

Instead, the way to really honor the Carter legacy would be to put evacuated tube collectors on the West Wing in exactly the same spot that the original panels were placed. The more efficient tube collecters would need less space than the Carter-type flat plates, and an installation the same size as the original would provide a much larger fraction of the needed hot water than the original one did.