GOLDEN, COLO. - Thirty years after it was founded by President Jimmy Carter, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory at the edge of the Rockies still does not have a cafeteria.

Evaporation chambers for new solar energy systems look as though they belong in an H.G. Wells movie. Technicians had to knock out a giant door from a testing facility to fit modern wind turbine blades, which now stick out like a bare toe from an old sock.

The hopes for this neglected lab brightened a bit a little more than a year ago when President Bush made the first presidential call on the lab since Carter. He spelled out a vision for the not-too-distant future in which solar and wind power would help run every American home and cars would operate on biofuels made from residues of plants.

But one year after the president's visit, the money flowing into the nation's primary laboratory for developing renewable fuels is less than it was at the beginning of the Bush administration.

The lab's fitful history reflects a basic truth: Americans may have a growing love affair with renewables and the idea of cutting oil imports and conserving energy, but it is a fickle one.

The new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, just promised committee hearings on how lawmakers could help limit climate change and enhance energy independence; congressional Democrats pledged to find more research dollars for clean energy. And President Bush, in his State of the Union address, called for greater federal mandates to increase use of homegrown alternative fuels.

But the intertwined goals of developing domestic energy resources and reducing global-warming gases are not necessarily in step with each other. No one so far has wanted to pay the extra costs to make wind and solar more than a trivial energy source. Research is uncertain and expensive, and the benefits seem far away.

So although all kinds of domestic energy technologies are being advanced, most of the money and attention are still focused on the dirty but cheaper standbys: offshore oil, oil sands and coal.

"You have fossil fuels competing with renewable fuels," said Benjamin Kroposki, a senior scientist at the Renewable Energy Laboratory. "Renewables lose every time."

One example is the shotgun approach to tax incentives, loan guarantees and other spending in the 2005 energy act, the first major energy legislation enacted by Congress in a decade: $13.1 billion for oil, gas and coal, $12 billion for nuclear energy and $7.7 billion divided among an assortment of renewables such as ethanol, hydroelectric, wind and solar.

Now that they are in control of Congress, Democrats have promised to increase the amount going to renewable energy sources, taking the money from tax breaks for oil companies.

But even additional money for renewable energy will go up against government tax policies that encourage more energy consumption. Companies can deduct purchases of sport utility vehicles and utility bills, and consumers get a break to build bigger homes with deductions for interest payments on mortgages, even on second homes, that far outweigh their energy saving credits.

Meanwhile, fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles have changed only slightly over the decades, and the federal government does not have a building code to encourage energy efficiency.

It is a policy mix that goes back many administrations and appears difficult to shake, partly because dirty sources of energy such as coal and shale are what the United States has in abundance.

"We are going dirtier," said Amy Jaffe, an energy expert at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. "If you need to come up with a fuel source other than drilling for oil under the ground in the Middle East, what is the most obvious thing with today's economy, today's infrastructure and today's technology? Oil shale, liquefied coal and tar sands. It's all dirty, but it's fast."

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