Parts of the country may be left in the dark again. That’s because researchers and companies working to prevent future power blackouts are seeing their federal funding slip away to lawmakers’ home-district projects.

Bush administration officials confirm they are being forced to cut or reroute federal money from superconductor technology research to make way for the pet projects that Congress approved in an energy spending bill last fall.

Pet projects. Pork barrel politics. It’s like a broken record.

Research aimed at increasing the capacity of electrical transmission lines fivefold &045; tenfold eventually &045; is attractive because eventually will allow more electricity to reach customers without having to build new, aboveground transmission lines.

But throwing a wrench into the research are previously rejected pet projects that were included in last fall’s $27.3 billion energy and water appropriations bill by congressional negotiators. The congressional negotiators recommended $47.8 million for research into high-temperature, superconducting cables and generation equipment. But the Energy Department’s Office of Electricity Transmission and Distribution said it will only be able to spend $32 million because it is stuck with $26 million in congressional projects it doesn’t want.

Some of the congressionally mandated programs include a $300,000 project on the use of recycled carpet as fuel for kilns; $2 million for a PowerGrid simulator, a project that finished last in a competitive review by experts; $1 million for a joint research program to enhance the performance of second-generation, high temperature coated superconductors;

$300,000 for research on advanced ceramic engines and materials for energy applications, a project which has no connection to the electrical transmission office; and $4 million to continue research on aluminum matrix composite conductors, far more than the office planned to spend on that technology.

Then, despite the budget crunch lawmakers helped create, some are unhappy that the administration hasn’t found a way to fully fund the superconductivity research.

Will lawmakers ever get it? One would think that the huge blackout in the Northeast last summer would have hastened the urgency for research into the technology. But pork barrel politics continue to get in the way. And they will, until voters let their congressmen know it’s time it all stopped.