Sounds like America chose “museum piece” from Carter’s options.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_Hou...
(they were also not "solar panels" it was solar water heating and it was sorta useful but mostly symbolic).
This means that there was no innovative technology in them, and they represent a technology path that is significantly less space efficient and less useful vs PVs.
It is also worth noting (especially on a platform that believes in American excellence as much as HN does) that modern PVs really trace their history back to Martin Green, who did most of his work with Australian Japanese and Chinese researchers (since he was in Australia), so funding the projects of American scientists might have not yielded the best results anyway.
So in many ways, you could argue that Carter’s solar focus was symbolically great, but stronger US subsidies would just make the US look like Germany - expensive and inefficient PVs that are increasingly becoming a liability (though bless them and their utility customers for powering through and continuing to install new, more efficient equipment).
Well tried but factually wrong.
Thermal solar is a battle-proofed low-tech for water heating (or even residential heating) that does not require any expensive Gov subsidies or public money to be deployed at large scale.
It is currently common to find such panels in developing countries as a cheap way of providing hot showers to people without power grids. In countries where the notion of gov subsidies often does not even exist.
That has very little in common with the giant public money sink shitshow that is the German energiewende.
All you need to know about the respective legacies of Carter and Reagan.