HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Gov. Ed Rendell and state utility regulators challenged the federal government's inclusion of 52 Pennsylvania counties in a regional corridor where states could lose the ability to stop high-voltage power lines from being built.
The corridor's boundaries are far broader than intended by Congress, going so far as to include parts of the state that have no electric transmission problems, the Pennsylvania officials said.
Lines that cross Pennsylvania may not deliver any benefit to electricity users in the state, and the U.S. Department of Energy, which drew the corridors, did not consider alternatives to meeting growing power demand, Rendell said.
"They will be delivering dirtier, fossil-fuel-derived power from states to the south and west of Pennsylvania at a time when we're trying to protect the environment and meet our energy needs through clean and renewable technologies,'' he said in a statement.
The Rendell administration on Friday asked the Department of Energy to reconsider the corridor's boundaries. The state Public Utility Commission also asked the department to reconsider, and sued last week in federal court in Harrisburg to stop the federal government from acting on the designation.
Megan Barnett, an Energy Department spokeswoman in Washington, D.C., said the federal agency was reviewing the reconsideration request.
The Energy Department, Barnett said, "benefited from full public participation on its decision to issue national interest corridors, which included months of public review.''
She said the decision followed more than 60 hours of public meetings across the country and came after the agency received and evaluated more than 2,000 public comments.
The mid-Atlantic corridor was one of two mapped out by the Energy Department last month. It would encompass all or parts of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. The other corridor is in the southwestern United States.
Four massive power line projects spanning a combined 900 miles across mid-Atlantic states have already received approval from PJM, the region's electric grid operator. The lines could provide the first tests of a 2005 law that allows federal regulators to override states that do not approve certain transmission lines.
The lines, which would cost several billion dollars to build, are designed to relieve the strain on existing lines that officials say could overload as early as 2012 and to bring cheaper, surplus electricity from Appalachia and the Midwest to big East Coast cities.