Energy Secretary Steven Chu, right, said the United States' agricultural base gives it an advantage for a more independent energy future, and gave some technical advice to an alternative-energy company, at the latest stop on the Obama administration's "Rural Tour" yesterday in Southside Virginia.“What this country has, perhaps more than any other country in the world, is an agricultural resource,” Chu told a crowd in the Pittsylvania County town of Gretna, population 1,250. The town is the site of Piedmont BioProducts, which says it hopes to commercially produce "petroleum replacement products" from switchgrass and other crops.
Matt Tomsic of the the Danville Register & Bee reports, "The men were in the plant looking at the production equipment when Chu made a comment about the silver pipes that turned at right angles. He said the sharper angles required more energy to push the contents through the turns." Chu, a physicist, said, “The bends cost the most amount of money. Big circles reduce the resistance a lot. These are all the wrong bends.” The firm's owner, Ken Moss, laughed and replied, “They’re the only ones we could afford at the time.”
Chu, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and freshman U.S. Rep. Tom Perriello "thoroughly" answered questions from the crowd, Tomsic reports. Perriello, who narrowly ousted Republican Virgil Goode last fall, is one of several first-term Democrats whose districts are part of the tour, on which Vilsack is making all stops. UPDATE, July 21: Perriello, who voted for the climate-change and energy bill, "is a test case for whether President Barack Obama's energy agenda will help or hurt vulnerable Democrats in next year's midterm elections," Stephen Power reports in The Wall Street Journal. "Skirmishing on the climate bill in Mr. Perriello's conservative district, which voted Republican in the 2008 presidential election, has been particularly fierce," with broadcast ads attacking and defending the Democrat. (Read more)
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