Steven Chu und die Energie-Geldtöpfe
Gutes Porträt im Economist zu Steven Chu, der in der Obama-Administration als Energieminister viel Einfluss auf die Verteilung öffentlicher Gelder und Lenkungsabgaben hat...
That, of course, requires money. Fortunately, Mr Chu has it. Besides his department’s annual budget of $26 billion, he has got his hands on $39 billion of the stimulus package. So he is able to spend like a drunken sailor when he chooses. On June 24th, for example, he announced that Ford would receive a loan of $6 billion to make its petrol-powered cars more efficient, while Nissan and a small Californian firm called Tesla Motors would get loans of $2 billion and $465m respectively to push forward with electric cars. On June 25th he followed this up by saying that $3.9 billion would be made available for revamping the American electricity grid. Building a “smart grid” is an important part of his plan. It will let wind and solar power be transmitted to the cities, and smooth out peaks and troughs in demand—for example by feeding power to the batteries of parked electric cars at night, and sucking it out of them during the day, if their owners agree.
It is not all largesse, though. The budget for hydrogen-powered vehicles, once the darlings of the alternative-energy lobby, has been slashed. Mr Chu does not believe in them. The long-awaited Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump has also been axed. He reckons the existing system of local storage is good for a few more decades and is looking into an old idea for dealing with nuclear waste: “burning” it in special reactors that will transmute it into more benign elements, thus eliminating the objection that nuclear power simply dumps the problem of waste in the laps of future generations.
http://www.economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13941982&source=hptextfeature
