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Where did the Carter White House's solar panels go? (2010)
- neonate 3y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20230915220736/https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carter-white-house-solar-panel-array/ http://web.archive.org/web/20230915220736/https://www.scient...
- elihu 3y agoThe thing I didn't know until I came across a similar article posted here on HN a few years ago (maybe it was the same one?) is that the White House panels weren't photovoltaic, they were solar-thermal for heating hot water. Basically, Carter wasn't deploying some cutting edge and extravagantly expensive (at the time) technology that could be deployed as a high-profile technical demo but not actually economical to use, he was deploying a cheap, practical technology that could be used on most houses, during warm months at least.
- interestica 3y agoI didn't know they were solar water heating until right now. Barbados has been a cool case study of large scale adoption of solar water heating: https://cdkn.org/resource/cdkn-inside-story-seizing-the-sunshine-barbados-thriving-solar-water-heater-industry https://cdkn.org/resource/cdkn-inside-story-seizing-the-suns...
- whoisthemachine 3y agoI was just on vacation in Greece, and solar water heaters are on every home and building there.
- tetris11 3y agoEverybody and their dog had a solar heater on their house in Cyprus, from 30 years ago. It was cheap deployable tech accessible to literally peasant farmers. I visited Sardinia recently for the first time, and saw the exact same type of houses built there, with the same climate, but not a single solar heater on their roofs. I wondered aloud why, but got no answer. My guess is that an energy company took an interest early on in Sardinia, and Cyprus was thankfully missed for a few decades.
- morkalork 3y agoIn Canada it's not uncommon too see some homemade looking solar heating setups connected to people's pools. The coiled black tubing on shed roofs is very distinctive.
- rootusrootus 3y agoI'm well below Canada's latitude, and it costs me $250/mo to heat a relatively small swimming pool (about 10,000 gal) ... in the summer. If I keep it warm enough to swim in October, it'll be at least twice that. The capital cost of the heater is practically zero compared to the fuel. I can totally understand janky DIY setups to try and defray that cost.
- ok_dad 3y agoThere’s a bunch of YouTube videos showing how to make them. It’s really easy, actually, and you can get like 250-500W of heating from what seems to be a reasonably small device.
- swasheck 3y agoi grew up in central florida in the 80s and we had solar-thermal water heating. we were not wealthy (dad was a construction worker and mom was an odd-job secretary) but my friends were all mystified by the things. i remember climbing up on our roof giving tours. something really did a number on society and it politicized so many things that needn’t be politicized
- Loughla 3y agoSo my grandfather turns 101 this year. He's kind of an ass in his old age, and wildly out of touch with the world. Like shockingly out of touch. But he talks about politics from back in the day. Everything has always been super politicized. Everything. But our memories are short as a country.
- hattmall 3y agoBut what does he talk about though? There have always been super political things, certainly, but the scope of what was political vs common sense has had a huge shift.
- Loughla 3y agoNot really. Look at the New Deal. That makes a ton of sense, but was incredibly political. Also the war on poverty. Complete sense. Super political. I guess maybe I don't know what you're talking about with common sense becoming politics. Do you have an example?
- mlyle 3y agoThings have always been politicized heavily... But that doesn't mean that things aren't significantly worse than the recent past. We actually had a political landscape from the 30's to the early 90's that was much less polarized than the rest of our history. We're returning back to where we were in the 1800's.
- BoiledCabbage 3y agoThere are polls, in the US at least, asking the same exact questions gong back I believe half a century or more. It is very clear from these polls that this is the most poltically polarized time in politics in decades. It's not just recency bias - things are really screwed up. Why (my opinion) one side started caring more about winning than any of their own positions. That then devolved into only caring if the other side loses regardless of what the policy is. If a party's main focus is the other side loses rather than to successfully govern - you end up here. And the fact they more or less admit it, and people jump to justify it shows how far things have fallen.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoSadly, I read often that at this point, PV is so good that it makes more sense to install PV panels and power a water heater via electricity. I don't want to believe it, but it's been said often enough that I am starting to do so.
- nerpderp82 3y agoI think electric solar heating makes sense for a lot of installations. Wires are easier than pipes, we still need electricity, make the existing system larger rather than split between the two. Heat water during the midday when output is high. I use almost no hot water, so the system would have a long payback period. But I can heat water in a 15A kettle. I love solar thermal, Trombe Walls should be integrated into the construction directly or added after the fact. They are for building heat, not water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trombe_wall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trombe_wall
- thsksbd 3y agoPV can beat solar thermal once a heat pump is used. However that ignores the externalities of PV and heat pumps manufacture, replacement and disposal so I think the argument is BS. Solar thermal is an aimed aluminum trough and a stainless steel pipe painted black on its focal point.
- 15457345234 3y ago> Solar thermal is an aimed aluminum trough and a stainless steel pipe painted black on its focal point. No, it's actually these fairly sophisticated phase-change evacuated tubes that have a heatsink at one end immersed in the water, from what I remember reading.
- thsksbd 3y agoEvacuated tube? Like the heat pipes on you CPU? Sure, but completely unnecessary unless you want to get rid of the pump [1]. And why get rid of the pump to substitute it with an evacuated tube? [1] which you don't even need if you route the system well or use valves.
- WalterBright 3y agoThere were many books and how-to guides at the time to add solar water heaters. Anybody who wanted one could install one. I know people who did. They didn't need permission from Reagan. Few wanted one.
- bombcar 3y agoThey still can be installed today, the sun hasn't changed much. And still they're rarely installed. I knew more people in the 90s who were ripping them out or leaving them dry (they were popular for pool heating in some areas) than installing them.
- WalterBright 3y agoThe people I know who had them complained about maintenance problems, and dealing with freezing weather. I've considered it several times, and it came down to it being too much work.
- bombcar 3y agoYeah, having large amounts of flowing and standing water on your roof is basically a recipe for maintenance headaches. PV is much simpler, and if it stops working you can just ignore it.
- WalterBright 3y agoApparently Carter's solar heater leaked, too :-( I once designed a solar swimming pool heater that had no moving parts and required no maintenance. I never built it because I didn't have a pool.
- bombcar 3y agoOne fun thing about all this is learning that “no moving parts” is a polite fiction when you have water at various temperatures over long distances (and solar heaters are long if unwrapped). Temperature changes can cause glued pipes to move enough that they become unglued. What fun! Modern PEX offers significant advantages there (hundreds of feet with no joints).
- JKCalhoun 3y ago> By 1986, the Reagan administration had gutted the research and development budgets for renewable energy at the then-fledgling U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and eliminated tax breaks for the deployment of wind turbines and solar technologies—recommitting the nation to reliance on cheap but polluting fossil fuels, often from foreign suppliers. Crazy. You see all these wind turbines all across the U.S. If not spread across the plains or along foothills, they're being shipped along the highways one blade at a time. I look at the transformation going on and figure we could have had this tech in the 80's. What happened in the last four decades? Talk about a lost generation. It was so weird to grow up in the 70's when they were teaching us the Metric System in public schools, when National Parks were adding meters, kilometers to signage. Reusable spacecraft, renewable energy, (and nuclear energy), computers, micro-electronics.... To be sure there were warnings of an ominous, overcrowded, polluted future ("Soylent Green", "Silent Running", just to call out a couple films of the era) but as a kid I was infused with the optimism of the time. Buckminster Fuller, NASA ... even the hippies and their communes. I think I still live in that world in my head. I hope maybe I have expressed a part of that optimism to my kids as I raised them.
- xg15 3y ago> What happened in the last four decades? Talk about a lost generation. Neoliberalism and the Chicago school of economics happened.
- bdcravens 3y ago"Hippy", "green", "woke": as time goes on, names change, but the battles of us vs them don't. There's a lot of partisan discussion around the idea of pushing back and "reopening" the spigot of oil and pushing back on EVs, for example.
- Justsignedup 3y agoIt's always the battle of should someone who has access to something valuable but harmful have the ability to use it and have society clean up the consequences. When phrased this way it sounds pretty darn easy of a choice, but reality never phrases it that way and that person had money to bribe politicians. And so we struggle. Because those with wealth do not want to give up their wealth.
- anonu 3y agoWe had solar-thermal panels on the roof of our house in Beirut in 1995... they're still going strong - just need to wipe them of dust every now and then. Hands down one of the best home appliance investments - especially in a country where electricity is sporadic. The reason they haven't picked up in the US is because infrastructure is good - electricity delivery is reliable. It's much cheaper to install an electrical or gas water heater rather than the complicated plumbing needed to add solar-thermal.
- nemo44x 3y agoPretty much. All in all they’ve been a very poor investment for home owners in America. At best you break even after ~20 years if they’re even still functional. Could change as tech improves but as of today they are pointless for most people.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoYou’re talking about PV, not solar thermal. Break even for solar thermal can be one year.
- reportingsjr 3y agoEven for PV, most payback periods are under 10 years at this point. In sunnier areas payback periods can be just a few years.
- 15457345234 3y ago> At best you break even after ~20 years if they’re even still functional. This is misinformation. I searched on google, bing and Yandex and all the results I found implied that breakeven would occur substantially before 20 years. The lowest breakeven time figure I found quoted was 5 years. The usual quoted breakeven ranges were, I'd say, 6-12.
- Kerb_ 3y agoSource?
- 3y ago