Renewable energy touted at Nevada policy 'summit'

LAS VEGAS — With clean-energy legislation trapped in a political deadlock, renewable-energy advocates called big business the new leader in the nation's green revolution during a national summit meeting Tuesday.

John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, said untapped potential in the sustainable energy market could revive the stalled economy and end the recession.

"The focus now has got to be on getting these worlds and mechanisms together to finance innovative, renewable technology," Podesta said.

The Center for American Progress Action Fund and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hosted the third in a series of national clean-energy summit meetings Tuesday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. More than 40 people rallied outside the event, with some wearing green hard hats and waving signs that equated clean energy with green jobs.

Reid said encouraging the development of emerging clean-energy industries could ease the nation's security problems and help overcome economic woes.

"We need to take that little spark and turn it into a wildfire," Reid said.

Retrofitting just 40 percent of the country's homes and commercial properties for energy efficiency would create 625,000 jobs over a decade, said Podesta, who was White House chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and headed President Barack Obama's presidential transition team.

Among the panels scheduled for the summit were ones on green energy, investments, jobs and state and national policy. A panel of business executives and owners chided Congress for failing to pass a substantive energy policy that would allow clean-energy manufacturers to compete with traditional energy giants.

"Energy should be a bipartisan issue, but it is not," said Kevin Smith, chief executive officer of SolarReserve, based in Santa Monica, Calif.

The Senate was unable to pass a sweeping energy bill in July after Republicans and Democrats sparred over a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. Reid said he would introduce a thinner bill this year that would incentivize property improvements for energy efficiency and promote the use of natural fuel.

"We've got to start getting the things done that we agree on," Reid said.

The legislation is modeled after the Pickens Plan, an oil independence campaign pushed by Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens.