Energy chief plays along with report of ‘carousing’ in The Onion

Energy Secretary Steven Chu may or may not have had sexual relations with that solar panel — but those rumors didn't lead to his resignation.

The departing Energy Department (DOE) chief played along Thursday with a story by jokester The Onion that said, “following a long night of carousing at a series of D.C. watering holes, Energy Secretary Steven Chu awoke Thursday morning to find himself sleeping next to a giant solar panel he had met the previous evening.”

He joked about the nonsensical allegation on his personal Facebook page:

I just want everyone to know that my decision not to serve a second term as Energy Secretary has absolutely nothing to do with the allegations made in this week’s edition of the Onion. While I’m not going to confirm or deny the charges specifically, I will say that clean, renewable solar power is a growing source of U.S. jobs and is becoming more and more affordable, so it’s no surprise that lots of Americans are falling in love with solar.

As of publishing time, the post had collected 689 “likes” from Chu’s 19,690 subscribers, and had also been shared 226 times.

Last week at the Washington Auto Show, Chu joked that DOE hasn’t “been smoking anything” when it comes to the department’s optimism in the electric vehicle industry.

Chu announced the next day that he would leave DOE once his successor is named.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Chu has been an advocate of clean-energy technology — and helped defend it against GOP attacks — during his stay in the Obama administration. He oversaw the disbursement of the low-carbon energy portion of the 2009 federal stimulus, and overhauled the departments research and development efforts.

He told DOE staff last week that he is likely to return to academic life and move back to the West Coast.