In Beverly, Carter-era solar site still charging the future | Massachusetts

BEVERLY — President Jimmy Carter was ahead of his time when he installed solar panels on the White House in 1979. As was Beverly, where a site born from Carter’s unprecedented alternative energy initiatives remains in use today.

The rows of solar panels trailing up the hillside next to Beverly High School were installed in 1981 with funding designated for eight experimental projects of its kind nationally.

Although solar photovoltaic technology used in such arrays was first developed in the 1950s and had been used in some small devices and NASA projects, America hadn’t looked to solar energy as a viable source for fueling power grids.

Like with the panels on the White House, Carter aimed to change that.

The Beverly solar array generated 12 kilowatts a year, enough to power 12 homes annually when it was first installed. It provided 10% of the energy used by Beverly High School, turning it into one of the first Green Schools in the country long before this term was even used.

Today, it is the last of these eight Carter-funded projects still standing.

“This site was the precursor to the solar boom in America,” Beverly resident Fred Hopps said as he looked over the hillside of solar panels two days before Carter’s funeral.

Carter served as the 39th president from 1977 to 1981. He died at age 100 on Dec. 29.

Carter faced an energy crisis from skyrocketing foreign oil prices when he first took office. Along with designating funding for projects like Beverly’s, he created the Department of Energy and signed the National Energy Act of 1978 to reduce the nation’s reliance on oil.

“Because America had reached peak oil, we weren’t producing enough here,” Hopps said. “Now we’re one of the leading [oil] producers in the world, so we’re not gaining on the clean energy front the way we need to. But so much progress has happened and this is a good example of it.”

Hopps is the director and steward of the Dr. John W. Coleman Greenergy Park, the name of the site the solar panels occupy. Coleman was a Beverly School Committee member and MIT nuclear physicist who convinced the Carter administration to bring the technology to Beverly.

“He was a champion, as was President Carter, in exploring energy efficiency and what was called energy independence at the time when climate change wasn’t being talked about,” Hopps said. “I’m trying to keep his legacy alive.”

The hillside has had a rocky history since the solar panels were installed four decades ago. A lack of funding for maintenance from Carter’s successors meant the panels, surrounded by overgrown brush, were completely offline by the mid-1990s.

The neglect spurred Coleman, Hopps and other volunteers to clean up the site and bring it back to life. Over the following 15 years, new solar panels were installed and the array, once again, created renewable energy.

The original solar panels were largely still operational, even if they weren’t the most efficient technology available. Researchers from the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado tested the original solar panels at the site in 2009 and found they could still produce 80% of the energy they could in 1981.

The site went offline again for several years starting in 2016 because of an issue with switches connected to the site, not the panels themselves, causing some to question the feasibility of such solar arrays.

Despite the setbacks, Greenergy Park is on track for a brighter future.

The panels are back online and produce 900 kilowatts a year, 10 times the amount of energy the array produced in the 1980s and enough to power about 120 homes annually, Hopps said.

In 2022, the city installed a new parking canopy and ground mount with solar panels at Beverly High School next to Greenergy Park. The work was part of an initiative to generate 4.3 megawatts of solar energy annually across six sites in the city.

This effort pushes Beverly closer to clean energy goals laid out for it as a Green Community, a designation that provides special funding from the state for municipal clean energy initiatives.

Hopps also plans to use $25,000 in Community Preservation Act funding to preserve Greenergy Park and turn an original inverter shed at its base into a visitor center. There, students will learn about solar energy, its history in Beverly and how it will bring the nation into the future.

“This is an example of how federal money can really spur an entire industry, and we saw that with the Clean Energy funding during the Biden administration,” Hopps said. “We need clean energy now more than ever.”

Hopps plans to make a donation to The Carter Center in Georgia on behalf of those involved in the Beverly site, he said.

Greenergy Park largely relied on volunteers from the nonprofit Solar Now and grant funding to stay in operation after the array lost federal funding under the Reagan administration in 1983.

The city paid for the site’s upkeep with help from state grants until the new Beverly High School was built in 2010. Since then, Kearsarge Energy has leased the land from the city, but owns and operates the current panels, using them to send energy generated there into the power grid.

An original piece of the 1981 solar panels is now displayed at the start of Greenergy Park. Its blocky concrete base against the backdrop of a field of sleek glass panels serves as a reminder of how far the site, and the nation, has come.

“If you’re in the solar energy business anywhere in the globe, you know they point to the array in Beverly all the time,” said Mike Collins, Beverly’s director of public services and engineering.

“We’ve had scientists come from all over to study it. It’s been an invaluable resource to the whole solar industry.”

Contact Caroline Enos at [email protected].