Portland, Maine (Platts)--8Jul2009

A coalition of environmental groups has sued several US federal agencies
over recently established power transmission corridors in 11 Western states.

The groups said in a statement Tuesday that the corridors benefit
fossil-fueled generation and want the government to shift the corridors to
link renewable zones to Western markets, according to the suit filed in the US
District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco.

"The West-wide corridors perpetuate the coal infrastructure that must
become obsolete very soon if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate
change," said Amy Atwood, public lands energy director at the Center for
Biological Diversity and a lead attorney in the suit.

The federal Energy Policy Act of 2005 required federal agencies to
designate corridors for oil, gas and hydrogen pipelines, and electricity
transmission and distribution facilities on federal lands in Arizona,
California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah,
Washington and Wyoming. The US Bureau of Land Management and Department of
Energy failed to consider reasonable alternatives or consider the
environmental effects of designating in mid-January nearly 6,000 miles of
energy corridors in the West, the suit said.

The suit argues that the federal agencies violated the energy policy act,
the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and the
Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

The suit was filed against the Department of Interior and Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar, the BLM and BLM Director Mike Pool, the Department of
Agriculture and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the US Forest Service and
Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell and the DOE and DOE Secretary Steven Chu.