The deals will involve trade in renewable energy, an area where the United States and China are competing for market share.
The agreements could also include biofuels and clean coal technology. Cleaner burning coal would help slow output of greenhouse gas emissions in the world's top two emitters of gases linked to global warming.
The US Energy Department would not name the companies that will sign the agreements, or say how much the deals are worth.
Steven Chu, the US energy secretary, and his Chinese counterpart, will oversee the agreement signings next Tuesday at a conference in Washington.
China recently surpassed the United States as the country with the largest amount of installed wind power capacity, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
One new wind turbine is built somewhere in the world every 30 minutes, with one in three of them installed in China, the environmental group says.
As the clean energy race heats up, tensions between the China and the United States on trade are rising. The United Steelworkers union accuses China of using illegal subsidies and other trade distorting policies to create jobs in its clean energy business, costing US jobs.
Besides next week's agreements, China in general is looking to invest in US energy market opportunities.
Kate Gordon, a vice president for energy policy at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, said China may invest in US energy in ways that could add jobs to the US economy and in some ways that could take away jobs.
Some Chinese electric car, wind and solar companies are thinking about coming to the United States to build manufacturing plants.
"Those investments are pretty much just only positive, those are job creating investments," Gordon said.
But China may also be interested in buying American companies that have not yet licensed their technology. "One of the things we have been seeing ... is a lot of outreach to labs to try to buy technology before it has been licensed and get the technology to move wholesale to China for development."
Another area of Chinese interest in U.S. energy is coal. China's coal demand is rising while US demand may fall as natural gas output rises and as Washington clamps down on pollution.
With China's booming economy and growing middle class boosting power demand there, US companies also hope to export clean coal technologies to the Asian giant.
North Carolina-based utility Duke Energy, whose Chief Executive Jim Rogers will attend next week's energy conference, previously signed a deal with China to develop smart electricity grids and capture emissions from coal-fired power plants.
Meanwhile, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Friday there has been a "substantial" inflation-induced appreciation in China's yuan currency that Beijing would do well to recognize and counter.
"Because Chinese inflation is accelerating more rapidly than U.S inflation, the right measure of the pace of appreciation is now more than 10 percent a year, and that is a very substantial, material change," Geithner told reporters at the White House.
In a continuing bid by the Obama administration to persuade China to let the yuan's nominal value rise more rapidly, Geithner opened a new tack earlier this week by saying it would be in China's own interest to do so in order to tamp down inflation in its own economy.
The so-called "real" exchange rate is adjusted to account for the substantial difference between Chinese and US inflation — 5 percent versus about 1 percent, respectively.
Geithner told an audience on Tuesday that the current "real" pace of appreciation would help correct an exchange-rate imbalance with the US dollar but at an unnecessarily severe cost to China. A stronger yuan in nominal terms could help cap Chinese inflation, Geithner contends.
In nominal terms, the yuan has risen about 3.6 percent since China dropped a peg to the dollar in June, touching a record high on Friday.
"The exchange rate has moved up a little over 3 percent ... against the dollar since June of last year. That is an annual rate of about 6 percent, maybe 7, 8 percent a year," Geithner said. "But that is not the best measure of competitiveness ... (which) is the combined effect of that change and the difference between China's inflation rate and ours."
Still, the pace of appreciation has not been enough to please US lawmakers, who argue China deliberately holds down the value of the yuan to gain a trade advantage.
The Treasury Department in October delayed a semi-annual report on the exchange rate practices of major US trading partners, avoiding a decision on whether to label China a currency manipulator.
Treasury is expected to revisit the argument about the difference between real and nominal exchange rates in that report, now expected sometime after the Hu-Obama meeting, but is not expected to pin a "currency manipulator" label on China which could lead to trade actions.
