Steven Chu's Week: Big Solar Plans, Proves Einstein Right

By all appearances, it's shaping up to be a good week at the office for US Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

On Monday, the Department of Energy announced a loan guarantee package totaling $1.4 billion coming as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for BrightSource Energy, Inc.

The company is moving forward with plans for the construction of a network of three solar power generating facilities in the Mojave Desert near the border between California and Nevada. Once operational, it will be the world's largest solar power complex according to the DOE press release.

In announcing the financial package, Chu underscores the relationship between active investment in emerging clean energy technologies and our economic well-being:

"This is an investment in American jobs and the clean, renewable energy our economy needs. We’re not going to sit on the sidelines while other countries capture the jobs of the future – we’re committed to becoming the global leader in the clean energy economy."

In a separate development, The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Secretary Chu is part of a research team that has confirmed Einstein's theory of general relativity to a degree of accuracy orders of magnitude greater than previous confirmation efforts.

Prior to joining the Obama administration, Chu served as faculty member in the University of California Berkeley physics department and directed the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. A journal article in the current issue of Nature details findings led by former Berkeley colleague Holger Muller, in which the physicists confirm Einstein's proposition that the force of gravity will make clocks run slower to a degree that is 10,000 times more accurately than previously measured.

Maybe that's how he found time to fit this all into one week.

Photo courtesy of United States Department of Energy via Wikimedia Commons