Kevin Moloney for The New York Times

A coalition of environmental groups is suing federal agencies in an effort to change the location of corridors to transmit energy across Western lands.

The environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Wilderness Society, as well as several Western environmental groups — say that the corridors, which were designated in January by the Bush administration, are convenient for moving electricity generated by coal plants and other fossil fuels, but do little to facilitate the production of renewable energy on public lands.

“These are a product of a fossil fuel past,” said Carl Zichella, the director of Western renewables projects for the Sierra Club, in an interview.

The complaint was filed on Tuesday in a federal district court in San Francisco. It names as defendants several federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior, as well as its subsidiary, the Bureau of Land Management; the Department of Energy; and the Department of Agriculture and its subsidiary, the Forest Service.

Those agencies, the suit charged,

created a sprawling, hop-scotch network of 6,000 miles of rights-of-way known as the ‘West-Wide Energy Corridors,’ without considering the environmental impacts of that designation, without analyzing any alternatives to their preferred pathways, without considering numerous federal policies that support renewable energy development, without ensuring the corridors’ consistency with federal and local land use plans, and without consulting other federal agencies or western states and local governments.

Mr. Zichella acknowledged that the Obama administration has been far friendlier toward the environmental groups’ priorities than the Bush administration. Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, is pushing aggressively to develop solar power on public lands.

The lawsuit, Mr. Zichella said, was to “help prioritize one thing to help them meet that goal.”

The environmental groups say that the corridors designated by the Bush administration go through a number of Western treasures, like the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, the Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area in California and the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico.

Mr. Zichella said that the Sierra Club was not against transmission as a general rule, but wanted to ensure that the lines served renewable energy, more than fossil fuels.

Also, “We want to build them in the right places to do the least environmental harm,” he said.