Connecticut Seeks to Shut Off Cross-Sound Cable (Again)

- Skirmishing over an underwater electrical wire is fast becoming a rite of spring between Long Island and Connecticut.

Last year, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York asked the federal government to energize the Cross-Sound Cable, an underwater power line that carries electricity and political acrimony back and forth across Long Island Sound.

In 2004, it's Connecticut's turn, and the state attorney general is demanding that the cable be shut off.

Recently, the attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, asked a federal appeals court to rescind an emergency order that has kept the cable on since the August blackout. Supporters of the cable derided his plea, saying the line benefited both Long Island and Connecticut.

The cable had long been kept from operating by various court decisions, but in August, the federal Department of Energy ordered that it be powered up because of the electrical emergency created by the blackout. Mr. Blumenthal says that the emergency has subsided and that the cable is now operating illegally.

Richard Kessel, the chairman of the Long Island Power Authority, dismissed that claim. "Now that spring is here and the birds are chirping and the buds are blooming, it's time for Blumenthal to come back and make a political issue out of a serious energy issue," he said. Mr. Kessel and most New York politicians have been supporters of the 24-mile cable, which runs from Shoreham, N.Y., to New Haven, Conn., and can carry 330 megawatts of power. They have argued that the cable is a benign and necessary link between Long Island's isolated power grid and that of New England. Mr. Blumenthal and other Connecticut politicians have fought the cable just as vigorously. They say that it was not buried as deeply as required by law and that it siphons power from the grid in southwest Connecticut. In asking that the court order be lifted, Mr. Blumenthal wrote that the cable "will likely have massive, adverse rate impacts on Connecticut's electric consumers." He said redcently that the cable would cost the state about $34 million a year in lost electricity. The cable is owned by the Cross-Sound Cable Company and leased by the Long Island Power Authority for about $20 million per year. Though power can flow either way, 475,061 megawatt-hours of power flowed to Long Island on the cable in March 2004, while 6,341 megawatt-hours went to Connecticut, figures from Mr. Blumenthal's office show. Various groups had opposed the cable for environmental reasons, but a study commissioned by the Cross Sound Cable Company released in March 2004 found that the cable had not affected underwater life around it. Mr. Blumenthal said the study was barely credible because it had been financed by the cable's owners. "We will take it with as many grains of salt as there are in the sea," he said.