Is Our Nobel-Winning Energy Secretary Innumerate?

Apparently Nobelist and Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu's reputation is sustaining some damage over the Solyndra scandal. I guess. His reputation ought to have taken a beating over silly statements like this rather than the Solyndra scandal, but Solyndra will have to do. Anyhow, Chu appears to be defending the Solyndra debacle thusly:

Chu cited a report saying that the global green energy market is worth almost $240 billion worldwide, and that photovoltaic systems — which turn light into electricity at the atomic level — are part of an $80 billion market.

“That’s nearly as much as Americans spend every year on beer,” he said. “The difference is that the solar PV market will grow and will dwarf the beer market.”

Holy Moley! Solar is, like, so gonna be bigger than beer!

I hope so. The approximate value of the global energy market is $8.4 trillion and the same figure for the global beer market is $325 billion. So if solar gets to be as big a deal as beer, it will still be less than 5% of the global energy market, closer to 4%.

Are we really well served by throwing precious billions of dollars that we don't have at technologies that, should they meet extremely aggressive growth targets, will still represent a small fraction of our energy sources (and thus have no impact on greenhouse gases, which have a completely theoretical relationship to global temperatures, which may or may not be bad if they were to rise...) ??

This is what happens when smart people like Secretary Chu get caught up in politics. It is a corruption of sorts.