U.S. Offers $85 Million to Promote Efficiency

The United States will contribute $85 million over the next five years to a $350 million effort by industrialized countries to help spread efficiency and low-carbon energy sources in the developing world, the energy secretary was expected to announce Monday.

The secretary, Steven Chu, in Copenhagen for the climate negotiations, was also expected to announce that he was inviting his counterparts from around the world to the United States next year to a first-ever “clean energy” meeting at the level of minister or cabinet secretary.

American government officials disclosed some details of Mr. Chu’s Renewable Energy Deployment Initiative in advance of his announcement.

The initiative includes an effort to provide electric light to remote places that now use kerosene, which is expensive and polluting.

The electric light will be in the form of light-emitting diodes, fed by solar photovoltaic cells and batteries.

This would be an attempt to leapfrog over the current standard, incandescent lamps, and even over the compact fluorescents that are now being promoted in the industrialized world, into something even more efficient.

Choosing an extremely efficient form of lighting, even if it is more expensive, is cost-effective if the electricity source is also expensive, as solar power and batteries are.

The initiative will also seek to create worldwide the kind of policies that the United States has at least partly put in place to improve efficiency: creating incentives for making high-efficiency products, for example, and developing standardized labeling to help consumers choose them. This would cover equipment that runs on electricity, including home appliances.

Under the initiative, industrialized countries will establish an online forum in which they can exchange information on deploying high-efficiency and clean-energy technologies.

Italy, Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, Norway and Switzerland are all expected to contribute; some had previously announced their pledges, contingent on American participation.