From WashingtonPost.com: Nobel Physicist Chosen To Be Energy Secretary

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to be the next energy secretary, and he has picked veteran regulators from diverse backgrounds to fill three other key jobs on his environmental and climate-change team, Democratic sources said yesterday.
...

Chu, the son of Chinese immigrants, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work in the "development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light." But, in an interview last year with The Washington Post, Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago. "I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed," he said. "Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation."

I think that this is a bold choice for the future.  Obviously a smart guy in regards to alternative energy, but how will he manage the bureaucracy and the push back from the established energy industry?  Because he's not a big name like an Al Gore, Chu will probably be more of an ideas guy and lead the formation of the plan and President-elect Obama himself will be the hammer to push these ideas through.  It's interesting to have an actual scientist who knows about energy to be running the Energy Department instead of a lawyer or a bureaucrat.

UPDATE:
An analysis from the NYTimes.com: Energy Choice -- Nobelist With Climate Passion