Transmission lines will help generators skirt clean air laws in California

You would never be able to build a new coal-fired power plant in California--but you just might be able to in the state next door, and a new transmission line project makes the prospect more plausible.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has committed California to an interstate power project that environmentalists warn could help usher in a new era of electricity generation that will dirty the air and spoil the water for the next 50 years.

Schwarzenegger and the governors of three other states -- Wyoming, Utah and Nevada -- last month pledged support for a proposed 1,300-mile electricity transmission line imagined as a new highway for megawatts in a region starved for more power.

Schwarzenegger's top energy advisers tout the so-called Frontier Line as a way to lessen sky-high electricity bills, create a more reliable Western energy grid to protect against blackouts, and encourage the use of sources like the wind and earth to produce eco-friendly power. The line is conceived as an incentive for new power generation in the three interior states that would be built mainly to feed California's revving economy.

But the Frontier Line plan comes as energy companies have proposed more than two dozen power plants across the West that would be fueled by coal -- a high-polluting fossil fuel that clean-air advocates contend is a major contributor to global warming.

They worry that the line could encourage the coal projects -- none of which are proposed in California -- and allow this state to, in essence, import power while exporting pollution.