New doings at the White House

Looks like Chu may be on his way out. Good riddance -- may have won the Nobel Prize for physics but he doesn't know anything about alt.energy. From ABC News:

White House Email: 'Coming Storm' Over Solyndra 'And Other Inside DOE Deals'
New internal White House emails reveal that a scathing critique of Energy Secretary Steven Chu by a former Obama political advisor was widely circulated at the highest levels of the administration.

The Feb. 25, 2011 email that sparked the deliberations landed on West Wing desks just as the solar energy firm Solyndra was starting to show outward signs of financial trouble. It was sent by Dan Carol, a former Obama campaign staffer and clean energy advocate who was described by Obama's then-Chief of Staff Pete Rouse as someone whose views "reflect the President's general philosophy on energy policy."

Carol's four-page proposal to restructure the Energy Department included the blunt recommendation that Chu be fired, and that his leadership team also be replaced, calling it time for "serious changes, even if they are uncomfortable to make."

A bit more:

The Carol email and the internal deliberations that it spawned became public late Friday along with 135 pages of other internal documents that the White House sent to Congress. The document dump was the latest attempt by the Obama administration to respond -- on its own terms -- to a subpoena for all materials that reference the Solyndra loan in any way. It also comes less than a week before Chu is scheduled to testify before a House Energy and Commerce investigative subcommittee about the Solyndra loan.

When will these people realize that there is no free lunch out there. The energy densities of batteries prohibit their use in a vehicle with a usable range and basic chemistry prohibits anything more than an incremental gain -- a breakthrough will not happen. Meanwhile, they are ignoring alternative forms of nuclear energy that yield all the power we need with minimal waste.