Energy Summit Tackles Bold Ideas

WASHINGTON (TheStreet) -- The "National Energy Summit" sponsored by the committee on competitiveness with the exclusive media support of Newsweek will convene Wednesday in Washington.

This "summit," which is actually more like a symposium, bears some watching as it may portend the direction of national energy policy to come.

The summit represents a culmination of a number of smaller conferences that have taken place in the last year and a half, bringing together CEOs, educators, engineers, labor leaders and government representatives. The aim is to create an integrated plan to develop, manufacture and support sustainable energy in the United States.

Participants for this final conference are very impressive and include the CEOs from DuPont(DD Quote), Alcoa(AA Quote), Applied Materials(AMAT Quote), CA(CA Quote), Royal Dutch Shell(RDS.A Quote), Marathon Oil(MRO Quote), Caterpillar(CAT Quote), FedEx(FDX Quote) and others. Eight U.S. senators, both Republican and Democratic, are honorary committee members and the secretary of energy and secretary of transportation will also be in attendance and speaking.

What is clear is that if the Obama administration ever is prepared to move in a bold way towards turning its campaign promises on green energy into real policy, these guys at compete.org will have a lot of influence on what that policy and initiatives will look like.

The council has already released several papers documenting recommendations for the president, should he want to move forward. Two of these recommendations are pretty bold in their scope:

One, the committee recommends a $200-billion "National Clean Energy Bank" to deliver low- to no- cost loans to develop sustainable energy technologies and companies.