It was a novel idea at the time, but one that made sense: In 1979, President Jimmy Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the roof of the White House.

They were removed just seven years later, under President Ronald Reagan. But that wasn’t the end of their story. They were picked up at a bargain price by a small college in Maine, where they continued to generate power for years, and eventually ended up scattered around the United States and China.

When the panels were first set up on the roof of the West Wing, energy independence was a big issue in America. An oil embargo imposed by Arab countries in 1973, in part to pressure the United States over its support for Israel in a brief war that year, had sent shock waves though the American economy.

“This dependence on foreign sources of oil is of great concern to all of us,” Mr. Carter said at an event to introduce the solar array. “No one can ever embargo the sun or interrupt its delivery to us.”

It was a decade before the first congressional hearing on climate change. “There’s no doubt Jimmy Carter was well ahead of his time,” said Ernest Moniz, the energy secretary under President Barack Obama and now chief executive of Energy Futures Initiative, a nonprofit group focused on renewable energy.

In 1986, the Reagan administration had the panels removed during work on the White House roof. They were never reinstalled.