WASHINGTON – A national energy plan that would send billions of dollars in tax subsidies to energy companies passed the House yesterday despite criticism from many lawmakers that it would do nothing to dampen high prices or lessen dependence on Middle East oil.

Within hours, the Senate began debating the legislation, with plans to vote on it on Friday.

Supporters said the legislation would establish a framework for developing a wider mix of energy sources in coming years, including wind turbines, lower-pollution coal plants, and new nuclear reactors.

Lawmakers avoided a certain fight in the Senate by leaving out one of President Bush’s top energy goals: opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. House Republicans promised to pursue that issue separately.

The White House said Mr. Bush, who had challenged Congress to end four years of stalemate over energy legislation, looked forward to signing the legislation. The president has acknowledged the measure will have little impact on oil or gasoline prices.

The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, said the legislation would address root causes of high energy prices, but “we didn’t get into this overnight and we’re not going to get out of it overnight.”

The bill passed the House yesterday by a vote of 275-156.

“This bill is going to go through lickety-split,” said Senator Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon, though he denounced it as a collection of giveaways to cash-rich energy companies that would fail to curb the nation’s thirst for imported oil.

Seventy-five Democrats joined Republicans in moving the 1,725-page legislation through the House.

“It is not a perfect bill,” said Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, the top House Democrat involved in crafting the legislation. “But it is a solid beginning to developing an energy strategy for the 21st century.”

Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican of Texas who chaired the House-Senate conference that crafted the final legislation, called it a bill “for America’s future.”

Sponsors said it would improve the nation’s electricity grid and foster energy conservation as well as production. In a move widely awaited in the Farm Belt, it also calls for doubling the use of corn-produced ethanol in gasoline to 7.5 billion gallons a year by 2012.

And it would extend daylight saving time by a month – an extra three weeks in the spring and another week in the fall – to save energy.

The product of weeks of negotiations that meshed widely different versions approved by the House and Senate earlier this year, the legislation would provide $14.5 billion in energy tax breaks, including $2.6 billion for oil and gas industries.

“This bill is packed with royalty relief, tax breaks, loan guarantees for the wealthiest energy companies in America even as they are reporting the largest quarterly profits of any corporation in the history of the United States,” complained Rep. Edward Markey, a Democrat of Massachusetts.

The bill also would direct loan guarantees and other subsidies to encourage construction of new nuclear power plants and develop carbon-capturing and other technologies to assure continued use of coal to produce electricity.

About $1.3 billion in tax breaks is earmarked for conservation and efficiency programs, including credits for buying hybrid gas-electric cars and energy efficiency improvements in homes.

“While it makes some progress on energy efficiency, it ducks the nation’s most important energy challenges,” said Bill Prindle, deputy director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, a private advocacy group. The group estimated the bill’s provisions would lead to little oil savings and – largely because of new efficiency standards for commercial appliances – reduce electricity by about 2% by 2020.