An old friend from Ohio visited us recently to do some carpentry that prepared our house in West Lebanon for winter and helped our daughter and her family ready their house in Etna for summer. Richard Downs prefers to install solar panels and build passive solar installations, but he learned decades ago he couldn’t make a living as a solar specialist alone in a fossil-fueled economy so he became an expert builder.

After Richard returned to Ohio, his first surprise was the election of Donald Trump and the second, a few days later, an unusually long list of orders for solar panels. We both wondered if there could be a connection between the election results and this sudden solar enthusiasm.

I emailed Kim Quirk of Energy Emporium in Enfield to ask if her firm had experienced a post-election increase in orders. “We’ve seen an uptick in requests for solar since the election,” Quirk wrote. “We attribute that to the election results and the fact that New Hampshire is changing the net metering rules. In a few months the new rules will come into effect, reducing the financial return on a grid-tied solar system. After that, we expect to see mostly people who are strongly environmentally conscious or who want to be off the grid.”

With solar politics in New Hampshire growing dicey, I was heartened by George Ball’s recent op-ed in the Valley News about the possibilities to be found in Michelle Obama’s White House garden. Ball is chairman and CEO of W. Atlee Burpee & Co., and he explains how President Trump could use the garden for his health and for accomplishing something worthwhile in his first 100 days. Given the weather in our nation’s capital, Ball says, the new president could be eating several vegetables from the garden within 75 days. “Indeed, the D.C. climate is so mild,” he adds. “that the White House Kitchen Garden can yield three end-to-end crops of arugula in the first 100 days; if he sows every two weeks, he’ll have to open a farm stand on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

You can see the underlying Burpee strategy in George Ball’s proposal. He cleverly appeals to President Trump’s entrepreneurial spirit. And that is exactly my solar point: preserving the White House panels could support the larger case that solar energy just makes good business sense.

Many of us have assumed the new president would want the solar panels torn down on his first day in the White House, taking his lead from President Reagan, as he did with his motto “Make American Great Again.” But aside from developing a reputation as a copycat, the president would encounter other complexities in tearing down solar panels, as well as health care systems.

The primarily symbolic Carter thermal panels Reagan took down were for heating water. But the National Park Service installed the first photovoltaic (electric) solar system at the White House in 2002, early in the administration of George W. Bush. It provides electricity to the White House grounds and hot water to the presidential pool, and it involved a substantial investment of tax dollars. Is it fiscally responsible to take this system out?

A more tempting symbolic move for President Trump, if he wants to underline the commitment to Big Oil suggested in his Cabinet appointments, might be to rip out the panels President Obama ordered for the White House roof. They were completed in 2014, and one criticism of them has been that they provide a small proportion, perhaps only 2 percent, of the electricity for the White House. The new White House solar array is not much larger than residential systems such as ours in West Lebanon.

But what if the new president were to make a hard-boiled business decision instead? While he waits for Republicans to come up with the elusive, perhaps even magical, alternative to ACA health care, he could propose an immediate expansion and improvement of the existing White House solar energy system. Just since 2014 the technology has improved, prices have come down and solar energy has had the largest growth of any industry in the U.S. That includes job growth. Within weeks of his inauguration the White House could sport a huge solar array with the latest, most efficient technology, and who would object if an elegant, tastefully lit TRUMPSOLAR sign rose above the White House?

Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.