We should thank Chu -- not castigate him - In most years the secretary of energy gets little public attention, but this year is different. Republicans like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are calling for Secretary Steven Chu to step down because they disagree with his efforts to change energy priorities and they blame him for a failed federal loan to a solar energy company.

I have to vehemently disagree with the author of the article.  One encourages technological development by providing funding for R&D of promising technologies not for implementation of technologies that are not yet economically viable.  By giving incentives such as production tax credits and/or cash in lieu grants, one merely encourages the technology providers to stop, or at least slow down, the R&D so they can concentrate on selling uneconomical technology to obtain the tax credit for their parent company.

The other thing that has occurred because of the PTCs and grants is that DoE have discouraged development of newer, higher efficiency fossil plants that will reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions while keeping in service older, lower efficiency units to provide backup for the unreliable renewables.  Wind, and to some extent solar, rarely coincide with the highest electrical demand.  Wind, in general, is operating at very low power if at all as the afternoon peak builds to its maximum somewhere around 5 to 8PM while solar begins to wane after the noon hour.  This means there is a lot of fossil power that has to be running to meet demand.  But, wind being most available in the 11PM to 6AM timeframe interferes with obtaining a reasonable return on investment as it chops away the off peak demand and a bit of the early morning waking up peak.  Result, new plants are not getting built but the older, inefficient ones are still needed to make up for unreliable renewables.

Lastly, the money the federal is pumping into the pockets of the wind developers actually impacts many other industries, including infrastructure building, because of the very high concrete and construction metals usage on a per MW nameplate capacity basis--a problem seriously more aggregious when considered on a per MWh basis due to the low capacity factor.  This problem is further exascerbated by the costs of building long distance transmission lines that must be sized to carry peak output of remote wind and solar farms but which seldom reach that peak and not for very long.

Secretary Chu is obviously blessed with a lot of "booksense" but is running short on commonsense.