On the floor of the chamber that has stymied efforts to make Florida power companies drastically increase their use of renewable and clean energy, 120 advocates gathered Monday to make the case again.

The Florida Business Network for a Clean Energy Economy hosted a Clean Energy Congress Monday, with clean energy lobbyist Susan Glickman presiding. The scene was a far cry from 2009, when a bill that would have required power companies to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources cleared the Senate, but was never brought up on the House floor.

It was brought up on that floor Monday repeatedly, albeit without the Legislature in session.

"We need a (renewable portfolio standard), period," Florida Energy and Climate Commissioner Kathy Baughman McLeod, a delegate to the Clean Energy Congress, said in a presentation to the group. "Other states have one. Your presence here is a cry for leadership from our state."

Other delegates agreed, raising the specter of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that has refocused the attention of state officials on renewable energy.

"We're running out of gas, folks," said Jim Fenton, director of the Florida Solar Energy Center at the University of Central Florida. "A child born today won't drive a gasoline-powered car, because there won't be any left. We can change our energy future today or we can change later. We just have to decide to do it."

Support for renewable energy legislation had waned before the April 20 explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Organizers of the Clean Energy Congress said at the outset they gathered the group -- a mix of renewable energy producers, academics and policy leaders -- in Tallahassee this week to change that. Glickman said the delegates at the congress were "clean-energy patriots gathered to declare our independence on foreign oil."