The plan presented to the Bank's policy-setting Development Committee is designed to improve access to alternative energy sources not only to preserve the environment but also to combat poverty, according to World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz.

He recalled that in the developing world an estimated 1.6 billion people do not have access to electricity, with 2.4 billion people continuing to rely on traditional energy sources such as firewood and dried animal excrement.

The Bank project, for which official finance figures have not been released, would harness public and private money but could also include the sale of carbon dioxyide emission rights as called for in the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown has said that at the meeting underway here Sunday he would propose a World Bank fund under which 20 billion dollars would be invested to develop alternative energy sources in poor countries.

But the Bank plan has provoked criticism in some quarters. The chairman of the Development Committee, Colombian Finance Minister Alberto Carrasquilla, said some of his colleagues -- whom he did not name -- "find the (project) to be biased toward the development of alternative, renewable sources of energy not yet commercially viable while neglecting the bigger picture of aiming for cleaner, more efficient traditional energy sources."

Dutch Development Minister Agnes van Ardenne noted that the project principally targets middle-income countries where there is a potential market for the development of clean energy.

She said she would have preferred an "energy for all" initiative that would embrace the millions of people -- 500 million living in sub-Sahran Africa alone -- who have no access whatsoever to energy.

Her German colleague, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, meanwhile called for the creation of a fund at the African Development Bank to which oil producers would contribute for the promotion of renewable power sources in African countries.

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