Originally published 2020-04-16.
Yes, the story is true, with one technical correction. In 2017 Jimmy Carter leased 10 acres of his farmland in Plains, Georgia, to the developer SolAmerica Energy for a solar farm. The 3,852-panel array has a peak capacity of 1.3 megawatts and was expected to supply more than half of the small town's electricity. It was the latest chapter in an interest in solar power that Carter had shown since 1979, when he put solar panels on the roof of the White House.
Below is what the Plains project actually is, what "half the town" means in energy terms, the full story of the White House panels, and what Carter's example says about solar power today.
The Plains solar farm in brief
SolAmerica announced the project on 27 January 2017, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held in Plains on 8 February 2017. The panels sit on single-axis trackers, which tilt through the day to follow the sun and capture more energy than fixed panels.
The electricity is sold to Georgia Power under a 25-year power purchase agreement. Carter did not build a private utility for his neighbours; he provided the land, the developer built and runs the array, and the power feeds into the grid serving the area.
Plains is tiny, with about 700 residents, so a modest solar farm can make a big difference to its energy balance. That is why a project of this size could cover over half of the town's needs, while the same array would be a small contributor in a large city.
At the launch, Carter said that "distributed, clean energy generation is critical to meeting growing energy needs around the world," and he predicted that the fast progress of solar and other clean technologies would continue.
Capacity versus energy: what supplying half the town means
Many reports described the farm as generating 1.3 MW of power per year. That mixes up two different things. A megawatt measures power, the rate at which electricity is produced at any moment. Energy over time is measured in megawatt-hours. So 1.3 MW is the most the farm can deliver at once, in full sun, not a yearly total.
When people say the farm supplies half of Plains, they mean that over a year its output is roughly equal to more than half of the town's electricity use. It does not mean half the houses run on solar every minute. At night the farm produces nothing, and the town draws on the wider grid like everyone else.
Some articles also compared the farm's output to burning about 3,600 tons of coal a year. That figure circulated widely, but the sources repeating it did not explain how it was calculated, so it is best treated as a rough illustration rather than a measured result.
The White House solar panels of 1979
On 20 June 1979, during an energy crisis marked by petrol queues and soaring oil prices, Carter dedicated a solar water heating system on the White House roof. The 32 solar-thermal panels heated water for the staff cafeteria, laundry and other uses. They did not generate electricity; they were solar collectors that warmed water directly.
Carter used the ceremony to make a broader argument. He predicted that a generation later the heater "can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken," or part of a great national effort. His administration set a goal of meeting 20 percent of US energy needs from renewable sources by the year 2000.
Fred Morse, who directed the government's solar energy programme during the Carter years and helped install the panels, later told Scientific American that the president saw solar as a serious domestic resource and wanted his administration to embrace it straight away.
Why the panels came down, and where they went
In 1986, during Ronald Reagan's presidency, the panels were taken down while the White House roof was being resurfaced, and they were not reinstalled. Morse's verdict was blunt: "It was working fine, but the decision was it was not cost-effective." Oil prices had fallen sharply by then, and federal support for renewable energy had been cut back.
The panels ended up in a government warehouse. In 1991 Peter Marbach rescued them, and from 1992 sixteen of them heated water on the cafeteria roof of Unity College in Maine. Others became exhibits. One is held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, one is at the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, and one was donated to the Solar Science and Technology Museum in Dezhou, China. In a sense Carter's prediction came true both ways: the heater became a museum piece, and solar energy also became a major industry.
Carter's wider energy record
The panels were symbolic, but they belonged to a larger programme. On 4 August 1977 Carter signed the law creating the Department of Energy, the first new cabinet department in over a decade. Energy legislation approved by Congress in October 1978 created tax credits for conservation and for energy from sources other than fossil fuels.
Carter famously urged Americans to turn down thermostats and wear sweaters, and he pushed for efficiency and domestic energy at a time when dependence on imported oil was seen as a national security risk. Not all of his energy policies were popular, and some of his targets were missed by wide margins. Still, his early bet on solar looks far more mainstream today than it did in 1979.
A modest life in Plains
Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, returned to Plains after leaving the White House in 1981 and lived for decades in the modest ranch house they had built there in the early 1960s. They spent much of their later lives on humanitarian work through the Carter Center and volunteering with Habitat for Humanity.
Rosalynn Carter died on 19 November 2023, aged 96. Jimmy Carter died at home in Plains on 29 December 2024, aged 100, the longest-lived US president. The solar farm on his land remains one of the more practical parts of his legacy, quietly feeding power into the grid for the town where he was born.
What the project shows about solar power
- Small sites matter. A 10-acre field near a small town can cover a large share of that town's electricity. Projects like this are known as distributed generation because they produce power close to where it is used.
- Leasing land is a common model. Landowners such as Carter provide the site and receive rent, while specialist developers finance, build and operate the panels.
- Read the units. Headlines often confuse megawatts and megawatt-hours. Capacity tells you the maximum output, not the yearly total.
- Costs have changed the argument. In 1986 the White House panels were judged not worth the trouble. Since then the price of solar panels has fallen dramatically, which is why projects like Plains are now ordinary business deals.
Sources: SolAmerica Energy: Carter farms solar project press release, January 2017; CleanTechnica: A Georgia town gets half of its electricity from Jimmy Carter's solar farm, 26 February 2020; Scientific American: What happened to the White House solar panels?; Wikipedia: Jimmy Carter.
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