Resch called for the playing field to be leveled between solar power and fossil fuels, for national standards to connect individuals’ solar system to the grid, and for consumers who produce enough solar power to sell that power back to utilities.

“We have a right to a fair competitive environment,” Resch said. “It’s the most basic right there is—equality under the law. Today, solar has anything but. And that’s not just an opinion, that’s a fact. From 2002 to 2008, federal subsidies to fossil fuels were $72 billion while solar received less than $1 billion.”

And, he added, in what amounted to a plea for funds to fight lobbying battles in Washington, the solar industry is being outspent in a big way by big coal and big oil.

“In advertising alone, the coal industry will spend $50 million and the oil and gas industries will spend over $100 million this year,” he said. “And guess how much the solar industry is spending to clear the air: Zero.”

Resch’s comments and the president’s smart-grid announcement come against the background of legislation pending in Congress that could have a monumental impact on the way the nation uses energy, how much energy it uses, and the sources it uses for energy. Already, that legislation has split some of the most prominent businesses in the nation from the nation’s most prominent business lobbying group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Among those to leave the Chamber over its opposition to climate-change legislation are Apple and the giant utility Exelon.

And that debate in the business community is expected to pick up in intensity as the U.S. Senate moves beyond the health care debate this year and onto the climate-change debate. That debate isn’t expected to begin in earnest until next year, but a taste of it comes this week.

The U.S. House has already passed a bill that would set limits on carbon dioxide emissions and force companies that exceed those limits to buy carbon credits from other companies that don’t pollute as much. The credits would be bought and sold in a market similar to a commodities exchange. And the bill would set requirements that the nation get a certain amount of its power from renewable resources like the sun or wind.

Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry have introduced similar legislation and were holding hearings before the Environment and Public Works Committee beginning Tuesday. The committee is expected to hear from 54 witnesses over the next three days.

Republicans and some Democrats have objected to the bills, calling them a tax on energy. Boxer, though, cites economic analysis from the Environmental Protection Agency that the bill would cost the average consumer $100 a day.

“For 30 cents a day, we will put America in control of our own energy future and take a stand for homegrown American energy, rather than foreign oil from countries that don't like us,” Boxer said.

Senator Lamar Alexander has proposed that the U.S. embark on a spree of building nuclear power plants instead. He wants to build 100 such plants in the next 20 years and argues that would achieve the same goal as the Democrats’ climate-change bills.

Kerry and Boxer will try to get the committee to pass legislation within the next two weeks.

“The science is screaming at us to take action,” Kerry said. “All of our best scientists, in peer-reviewed studies, tell us that if (the earth's temperature rises more than 2 degrees centigrade), we risk catastrophic changes to the climate, to our crops, to our water supply, to the ocean currents, to the ecosystems that we depend on.”