San Diego Gas & Electric Co. officials said Friday that they are willing to be held accountable by state regulators for delivering on their promise to move primarily green power along the proposed $1.7 billion Sunrise Powerlink high-voltage transmission line.

But Debra Reed, president and chief executive officer of SDG&E, said the San Diego-based utility opposes the idea of having to write and seek approval for a "compliance plan" that would require another round of hearings and delay construction of the project.

SDG&E proposed the 500-kilovolt power line nearly three years ago and is hoping the California Public Utilities Commission will approve the controversial project as early as Dec. 4.

At the same time, Reed vowed that the company would not use the line to move power generated by burning coal, a process that emits a huge amount of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that are being blamed for the warming planet.

Reed also said that if the line is approved, the firm will commit to getting one-third of its electricity from green energy sources, such as the sun and wind.

Like the two other major utilities in California, SDG&E is scrambling to comply with a mandate to convert 20 percent of its power from fossil fuels to green, renewable sources by 2010.

As part of California's emerging campaign to curb global warming, there is talk of bumping up that green requirement to 33 percent by 2020.

Reed made the comments at a two-hour commission hearing in San Francisco to discuss a pair of recommendations for the proposed 150-mile power line that SDG&E wants to string through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Santa Ysabel, Ramona and Rancho Penasquitos.

In one recommendation, called a proposed decision, an administrative law judge suggested commissioners kill the project.

In the other recommendation, dubbed an alternate decision, one of the five commissioners suggested rejecting SDG&E's favored route through North County and authorizing instead a southern route along the Interstate 8 corridor, with conditions.

Those conditions included the suggested compliance plan that would aim to keep the utility honest about its intentions.

While SDG&E has said repeatedly that it needs the line to meet the state green energy mandate, opponents have expressed much doubt about that.

"SDG&E's argument is, in essence, 'If we build it, they will come,' " said Michael Shames, executive director of the Utility Consumers' Action Network of San Diego, an advocacy group that opposes the line in any form.

But if the line is built, there is no guarantee that green power will come over its wires from the desert to SDG&E's customers in San Diego County and southern Orange County, Shames said.

And if history is any indication, he said, the utility may not deliver substantial amounts of green energy.

He said the 500-kilovolt Southwest Powerlink line that runs along the international border was built for the same purpose more than two decades ago but carries little green power today.

Steven Siegel, staff attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that opposes the project, told commissioners he would prefer to see the line killed outright.

But if commissioners decide to approve the southern route, Siegel urged that conditions be placed upon the project to ensure that sun, wind and geothermal energy will indeed flow through the wires.

Commissioner Dian Grueneich, the member of the five-member body that produced the alternate decision recommending a southern route, has scheduled a hearing for Thursday in San Francisco for supporters and opponents to discuss what kind of conditions should be placed on the project.

Reed, responding to a question from Grueneich, said her company is willing to submit to conditions, just not through the generation of another document that would have to be approved in a separate hearing, something SDG&E believes is unnecessary.

Reed said the project already had been exhaustively reviewed. With more than 11,000 pages, the case is the largest ever for a power line in California, she said.

SDG&E officials took issue with agency findings that the line is not needed until at least 2014 to keep the lights on in San Diego County. The company says it is needed as early as 2010.

Yakout Mansour, president and chief executive officer of the California Independent System Operator, which runs the state's power grid, suggested that debating when the electricity is needed is useless.

The bottom line, Mansour said, is that the project will be needed at some point in the next decade, and projects often are not completed on schedule and so it doesn't hurt to start construction early.

"Keep in mind that this is a project that is supposed to serve the state for 40 or 50 years," he said.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 745-6611, ext. 2623, or ddowney@nctimes.com.