Energy ministers, oil company representatives and civil society leaders from across the Americas gathered in Washington on Thursday and Friday for a meeting of the US-led Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas.

The Obama administration has pushed the partnership as a key part of its foreign policy toward the region, as well as an important step forward in the president’s goal of promoting clean energy and tackling climate change.

Officials from the Obama administration and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) presented a series of initiatives to promote energy efficiency and regional energy integration, develop renewable energy and biofuels, expand electricity grids and support efforts to adapt to climate change.

The IDB announced it would increase financing for renewable energy and climate-related projects to $3 billion annually by 2012.

Many participants acknowledged that the meeting created a positive forum for dialogue to develop projects that could help reduce dependence on fossil fuels in the region.

However, many attendees were also skeptical.Critics said the initiatives presented were mostly small scale “demonstration” projects, while leaders were unwilling to address the broader issues that have blocked the expansion of clean energy sources in the Americas.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Energy Secretary Steven Chu described some of the initiatives during speeches at the meeting.

Chu discussed projects that could improve efficiency, such as upgrading standards for refrigerators and expanding the use of fluorescent light bulbs.

Clinton described some of the larger-scale projects under the partnership. For example, Colombia is spearheading a plan to link electrical transmission lines from Panama, through the Andean region, to Chile, Clinton noted, while multilateral organizations are exploring the possibility of installing undersea electric cables connecting power grids in the Caribbean islands.

Such projects would facilitate the expansion of renewable energy by achieving economies of scale and allowing for diversification of energy supply.

However, participants tiptoed around the broader issues that have prevented Latin America from reaching its clean energy potential, such as faulty regulatory frameworks and non-market based pricing schemes, according to sources attending the event.

“My overall impression is that it was a talk fest with no real mission or mandate,” said one source.

Analysts say renewable energy sources in Latin America are underdeveloped because governments are unable to subsidize production, which is more costly than for fossil fuels. Yet leaders are unwilling to pass the additional costs on to consumers for fear of a political backlash. Many oil and gas producers in the region, from Venezuela to Argentina, mandate belowmarket electricity tariffs, making renewable energy uncompetitive.

Sources said these issues were raised during panel discussions, but the energy partnership has no framework for addressing them.

The idea of energy integration is another pillar of the partnership — a goal that Latin American countries have for years failed to achieve because of transnational political tensions or concerns about national sovereignty.

Much of the discussion centered on micro level projects, while avoiding broader controversial issues, said Eric Farnsworth, Vice President of the Council of the Americas.

“Until you get the right policies in place, a lot of this is just academic or theoretical,” he said.

Some analysts said the Obama administration chose to focus its policy toward Latin America on clean energy and climate change because these issues draw broad consensus.

Developing renewable energy, for example, is “a focal point that creates a unique commonality among the diverse roster of nations in the hemisphere,” wrote Jeremy Martin, who heads the energy program at the Institute of the Americas and helped organize the event. Although the debate focused largely on moving away from fossil fuels, some speakers described natural gas as an important transition fuel toward cleaner forms of energy, according to sources at the event.

Secretary Clinton said the US would promote the development of shale gas in the Americas. “I know that in some places [shale gas] is controversial, but natural gas is the cleanest fossil fuel available for power generation today, and a number of countries in the Americas may have shale gas resources,” she said. Little exploration has been done in Latin America to assess the region’s shale gas resources, but Clinton said the US Geological Survey was prepared to help explore this potential.

Lisa Viscidi, New York