Imtiaz Haque, executive director of ICAR, gives a tour to Senator Lindsey Graham and Secretary of Energy Stehen Chu. Imtiaz Haque, executive director of Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research near Greenville, presided over two one– day energy summits. The first summit, November 30, received U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, and David Wilkins, former ambassador for the U.S. in Canada. Co–hosting with Haque was Clemson President James Barker. The second energy summit, December 8, had as its keynote speaker General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt.

Haque is married to Columbia’s Mary Taylor Haque, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Edmund Taylor. Chu is a co–winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize for physics.

While in Greenville, Chu toured a General Electric plant that employs 3,100 workers building wind and gas turbines. In Greenville, GE also manufactures gear boxes for wind turbines and jet engine blades. The world’s largest gas turbine plant, the GE Greenville facility, exports 90 percent of its gas turbines.

Chu’s ICAR visit was connected with the secretary’s earlier tour of the Savannah River Site, where Chu and a South Carolina and Georgia congressional delegation broke ground on a new $795 million Biomass Cogeneration Facility. The goal is to replace a coal– burning electricity generator and oil–fired boilers, saving $35 million a year in operation and maintenance costs while also reducing 100,000 tons annually of greenhouse gas emissions.

During the 30–month construction period for the biomass plant, the project will generate full–time jobs for about 800 people. Once the plant is up and running, another 125 permanent positions will be filled in plant operations and maintenance and in the forestry and logging industries.

Chu praised S.C.’s nuclear power position, citing S.C.’s resources as a leader in the nuclear power industry. The Department of Energy, Chu said, is committed to restarting the nuclear industry in the U.S. Chu shared the issue of nuclear waste and declared a national panel soon will be named to consider options.

One week before Chu’s visit, the Department of Energy awarded Clemson’s Restoration Institute a $45 million grant to build a large–scale wind turbine drive train testing facility at Clemson’s research campus on North Charleston’s former Navy base. Public and private partners matched the DOE’s $45 million with another $53 million, making the largest single grant ever received by Clemson. The $45 million is to build the facility and must be spent in the first three years. The DOE suggests S.C. could be the home of 10,000 to 20,000 new jobs tied with the wind power industry over the next 20 years.

The Clemson Restoration Institute’s proximity to the Port of Charleston was key in attracting the DOE grant and the matching funds, $98 million together, because the drive trains will be large, maybe 20 feet in diameter and 60 feet long. The opportunity to transport by sea was seen as a huge advantage for the North Charleston site.

A week after Chu’s visit, General Electric Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt headlined the “Summit on Renewable Energy: South Carolina Job Opportunities in the Green Economy.” Immelt told the ICAR audience GE is interested in a partnership with Clemson’s Restoration Institute in North Charleston. The wind turbine testing facility will be in a former Navy warehouse, and it will be capable of full–scale highly accelerated testing of advanced drive train systems in the 5–megawatt to 15–megawatt range. The facility’s targeted operational start– up is scheduled for the third quarter of 2012.

Both summits were organized by Clemson’s Haque with the vision of a renewable energy cluster in S.C., a research and industrial behemoth that would create jobs across the state.