AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

In a call to arms this afternoon at the National Clean Energy Summit, Vice President Joe Biden made the case for continued investments in renewable energy, explaining that “we have to unleash” innovation in the sector to stay competitive and rise to the environmental and economic challenges of the day.

“If we don’t develop renewable energy, we will make the biggest mistake in this nation’s history,” he explained a crowd of over 700 policymakers, investors, students and other business professionals in Las Vegas.

He also criticized political opponents of clean energy investments who have fought to de-fund major R&D and deployment programs, explaining “the President and I are not going to listen to those voices.”

Biden did not lay out any new policy priorities in today’s speech. Instead, he used the platform to reiterate the Obama Administration’s support for investing in renewable electricity and fuels. In his January State of the Union Address, Obama called this period of history “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” and outlined a broad plan to get 80% of the nation’s energy from clean resources by 2035.

With the potential for significant reductions in long-term spending on certain energy programs, the Administration may find it difficult to make the investments needed to come close to achieving that goal. While Biden didn’t address those specific challenges, he did make it clear that that the White House was at least standing behind the goal rhetorically.

“I have one specific message. Our country has a choice. Are we going to rise to the challenges like our grandfathers and grandmothers did? Or are we going to be a follower?”

Budget negotiations this fall will be a true test.

To see the rest of today’s speeches and roundtables at NCES, you can watch the live streaming here.

In 2009, the world’s largest geothermal developer, Ormat, moved into the solar market – using its power plant construction expertise to build solar PV and CSP plants in Israel.

And in the last couple of years, a number of CSP developers have partnered with natural gas and coal operators to create hybrid solar/fossil plants in an effort to lower the installed cost of solar and make fossil generation more efficient.

It was only a matter of time before we saw the hybrid geothermal-solar plant.

A group of business and policy leaders were in Las Vegas at the National Clean Energy Summit this morning announcing the groundbreaking of the world’s first solar-geothermal power plant – a 24-MW facility that will combine 80,000 polycrystalline PV modules with traditional hydrothermal technology.

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Click Here to Watch Clean Energy Summit Webcast Starting 9 am PST

Reid, Chu and Biden Kick Off the Day, Climate Progress Will Have Exclusive Interterviews

Politico opens its Morning Energy briefing:

TODAY’S MAIN EVENT: The big happening in energy this week is the fourth annual Clean Energy Summit today in Las Vegas, where Vice President Joe Biden, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, California Gov. Jerry Brown and Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire are headlining.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid released highlights from his opening remarks:

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White House green jobs advisor Van Jones is under attack from Fox News as an “avowed radical revolutionary communist” and from ABC News as a “truther” with a “history of incendiary and provocative remarks.” In an attempt to assassinate the character of Van Jones, the right-wing media are distorting his past political activism and cherry-picking Jones’s critiques of the pollution and injustice that still haunt this nation. However, Jones’s true record is one of turning away from anger and finding hope, abandoning division and seeking consensus.

Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit 2.0 in Las Vegas this August, Van Jones argued that “for all of the battleground politics that’s going on,” energy policy should be “the one place that should be a safe harbor for all of us.” Van Jones praised the “bipartisanship” of Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, who as a representative from Los Angeles succeeded in getting “the first president ever to sign into law a green jobs act, President George W. Bush.” He recognized that the summit participants came to find a “healing for our politics” in a “common ground agenda”:

Many of you have taken chances to start companies, you’ve written books, you’ve been grassroots champions for the change that we need. And I think you’re seeking not just a healing for our economy or a healing for our planet, but a healing for our politics. And I want to acknowledge that many of us are here because we are seeking something deeper. This is the common ground agenda. It should be the common ground agenda. We should be able to come together as a country on this one. Finally.

Watch it:

Jones then explained that “the values that underlie this clean energy conversation” are “the common ground values of America.” Underlying the call for clean energy is the value that “clean air is better than dirty air for the health of our children.” Underlying the call for energy efficiency is that value that treating our country’s resources “with wisdom and respect is more important than wasting them.” And “if we have the opportunity to fight both poverty and pollution by putting people to work in these new industries, we would be wise as a country to do that.”

To extended applause, Van Jones explained that the Obama administration has committed $5 billion to improving the energy efficiency of low-income households because the same investment “that cut unemployment and cut an energy bill and cuts greenhouse gases is also going to cut asthma, and take asthma inhalers out of little girls’ and boys’ pockets.”

Jones discussed in further detail how President Obama’s clean energy agenda tears down traditional ideological divides by “asking questions progressives like” but “giving answers that conservatives should like”:

We’re asking questions progressives like but we’re giving answers that conservatives should like. We’re asking questions about how to move the needle on poverty and pollution and how we create more economic opportunity especially for people in the lower part of our economy. But the answers are answers that conservatives should like. We’re not talking about expanding welfare, we’re talking about expanding work. We’re not talking about expanding entitlements, we’re talking about expanding enterprise and investments. We’re not talking about redistributing existing wealth, we’re talking about reinventing an existing sector, and creating new wealth by unleashing innovation and entrepeneurship. This should be common ground. We should be able to stand together and be one country on this.

Jones concluded by again making the call for us to “be one country” and connect “the people that most need work” to the “work that most needs to be done”:

There is so much work that needs to be done in this country to retrofit America, to cut these energy bills. And there are so many people who need work. This is our opportunity as a country — and it comes around very rarely — to take the people that most need work, and connect them to the work that most needs to be done, to fight pollution and poverty at the same time, and be one country. Let’s be one country.

During the applause at the conclusion of Jones’s speech, prominent Republican oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens — who in 2004 funded the Swift Boat attacks on Sen. John Kerry — turned to Jones and shook his hand.

Transcript: Read more