WASHINGTON D.C. --
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who drew criticism from
Republicans over his support for loans to Solyndra LLC before the
solar-panel maker went bankrupt, will leave his Cabinet post in
President Barack Obama's second term, according to two people familiar
with the matter.
Chu’s departure will be announced as soon as next
week, according to one of the people. Both requested anonymity to
discuss personnel matters that haven’t been announced. The people didn’t
identify potential replacements.
The exit will leave the Obama administration with
vacancies at the top of the three departments that oversee energy and
environmental policy. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Lisa Jackson,
who headed the Environmental Protection Agency, have announced their
intention to leave the administration.
Chu, 64, was a career scientist and co-winner of the
Nobel Prize for physics when he joined the Cabinet in January 2009.
Supporters said Chu brought a fresh perspective to discussions often
dominated by politics in Washington.
Macondo Well
He led a group of scientists who studied ways to cap
BP Plc’s Macondo well, which gushed crude into the Gulf of Mexico for 87
days in 2010, and helped create a division within the department
dedicated to backing breakthrough energy technologies off the ground.
“Dr. Chu is focused on his job as secretary each day
and hasn’t made any announcements about his future plans,” Bill Gibbons,
Energy Department spokesman, said in an e-mailed statement.
Some Republicans in Congress said his leadership was
tarnished by the Energy Department’s endorsement in 2009 of Solyndra’s
$535 million U.S. loan guarantee and other clean- energy projects.
The solar-panel maker collapsed two years later,
prompting a congressional investigation of allegations that the award
was approved to benefit Solyndra’s biggest investor, an Obama supporter.
Thousands of pages of correspondence from the administration and
Solyndra’s investors failed to back up the contentions.
Solyndra Failure
Solyndra nevertheless became a frequent talking point
for Republicans on the campaign trail last year. Republican presidential
candidate Mitt Romney called it a symbol of the Obama administration’s
economic failures during a visit to the company’s shuttered factory in
Fremont, California.
This resulted in more attention than usually comes to
the department, whose budget is largely spent on maintaining the
nation’s nuclear stockpile. The 2009 economic stimulus provided more
than $35 billion to the Department of Energy for clean- energy projects
— more than its annual budget. That money financed the loan-guarantee
program under which Solyndra received its funding.
In other ways, the loan program was a success. An
independent review conducted for the White House found that the programs
that had received support were doing better than anticipated.
“What he could have done, he did a great job with,
which was implementing the stimulus bill and getting 30 some billion
spent out of DOE, and doing it without fraud and doing it effectively,”
said Richard Caperton, director of clean energy investment at the Center
for American Progress, a Washington- based group that promotes
progressive policies.
Renewable Energy
Wind- and solar-power generation doubled in Obama’s first term, and Chu remained a cheerleader for renewable energy.
“Not every company, not every product will succeed,”
Chu said in a 2011 speech. “But there’s no reason to sit on the
sidelines and concede leadership in clean energy.”
Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory, a part of the Energy Department, and an applied physics
professor at Stanford University in California before he joined the
administration.
Chu’s Facebook page says he carried out Obama’s “ambitious agenda to invest in alternative and renewable energy.”
He practiced what he preached. He often biked to work, and he has said
upgrades to his California home meant he didn’t need to turn on the air
conditioning.
Joshua Freed, vice president for clean energy at the
Third Way, which says it promotes consensus among the political parties,
said Chu deserves praise for promoting the Advanced Research Projects
Agency — Energy, a division within the department that backed new energy
technologies.
Chu sought to reorient the department to work more closely with industry to bring the technologies to market, Freed said.
“There is a practical and future edge to it that we haven’t always had with the department,” Freed said in an interview.
Copyright 2013 Bloomberg
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/01/energy-secretary-chu-said-to-plan-exit-from-obamas-cabinet
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