As president, Jimmy Carter was known for having bright ideas. He was the first president to install solar panels on the roof of the White House, after all. The former president’s passion for solar power didn’t end with that act. Recently, Carter leased a total of 10 acres of land in Plains, Georgia, to be used as a solar farm.

The town of Plains has significance to Carter – it’s his own home town. And now 50% of his home town gets power from his solar farm.

SolAmerica, the company in charge of completing the project, completed the project in February of 2017. In June of 2017, SolAmerica also installed 324 solar panels on the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, supplying 7% of the library’s electricity needs with clean, renewable energy.

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“Distributed, clean energy generation is critical to meeting growing energy needs around the world while fighting the effects of climate change,” Carter said in a press release put out by SolAmerica. “I am encouraged by the tremendous progress that solar and other clean energy solutions have made in recent years and expect those trends to continue.”

Solar power comes with a number of advantages. Over time, it is less expensive than fossil fuel-generated electricity, it results in substantially fewer pollutants entering the environment, and it can be more easily distributed than any other type of electricity production.

A solar power installation can be as small as 1 panel or as large as the Topaz Solar Farm, which contains 9 million solar modules. In the case of Carter’s solar farm, there are 3,852 panels producing 1.3 megawatts of electricity for the community of Plains, Georgia each year.

Distributed solar energy allows individuals and communities to have a huge, positive impact on the environment, create jobs locally, and take ownership of the means of producing electricity. Carter’s solar farm will continue to give back to the town of Plains for decades to come.