BOISE, Idaho - A Connecticut company whose subsidiary wants to build an $850 million power plant in Idaho and claims to have built plants large enough to light up San Francisco, Seattle and Denver combined has never built anything.

On March 9, Southeast Idaho Energy LLC proposed a coal-gasification plant near Pocatello on an abandoned industrial site.

The company, which founder Ramesh Raman said is made up of principals from Energy Development Group of Wilton, Conn., has won support from local officials in Power County and Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne.

According to a statement issued for that event, Energy Development Group is "a national developer of natural gas-fired combined cycle projects that has developed, permitted and constructed advanced energy plants generating more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity."

But research and interviews with officials in five states where the firm proposed at least nine gas-fired turbines in 2001 and 2002 show none was ever built and applications with state environmental agencies have either expired, been withdrawn or were stopped.

"The company said that the projects were on hold," said Tiffany Dickerson, a spokeswoman for the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, after checking with engineers there. "If they elected to continue the developments, they would reapply."

Its proposals were in Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, Alabama and Pennsylvania.

In one instance, public opposition to a plant near Allentown, Pa., that would have been located just 2,000 feet from a nuclear power plant prompted a three-judge panel to kill the project.

Officials from FMC Corp., a Philadelphia-based chemical company that's talking with Southeast Idaho Energy over a former fertilizer plant near Pocatello where the power plant would be located, say they knew all along that Energy Development Group had never built anything.

But local and state officials, who see the plan as a way to boost the region's economy hurt when FMC shut its plant down in 2001, say they got the impression from Energy Development Group that it had completed other plants.

"They said they had other power plants," said Power County Commissioner Kent Estep in an interview.

"That would be a surprise" to hear Energy Development Group hadn't built anything, said Ray Zimmermann, another commissioner.

Raman, reached by telephone, said he received permits to build power plants.

Those projects fell through, he said, when the price of natural gas tripled, making power from gas turbines too costly. In addition, power-trading markets that the plants would have relied on to sell their energy dried up after the Enron scandal.

Now that the Energy Department is spending $2 billion over the next decade to promote cleaner-burning coal power plants, Raman is pushing a coal-gasification plant that would turn coal from Utah and Colorado into synthetic gas and produce enough power to run 520,000 homes.

When asked about claims in the March 9 press release, Raman said Energy Development Group overstepped its actual accomplishments.

"I'm trying to be as straightforward as I can," said Raman, who ran the business from his home in Wilton until 2004, when he sold the house, according to records from the Wilton assessor's office.

"We're not pulling the wool over their eyes," he said. "If I couldn't get this thing done, I wouldn't have embarked on it. It's a small industry, and we all have a reputation to uphold."

Although Energy Development Group hasn't built power plants, Raman said he and its five other principals have been involved in successful projects while working for other companies.

Raman, a banker who says he has worked at Dresdner, Fleet and Sakura banks, helped secure financing for plants including one in Indonesia, he said.

Other partners in the venture did not respond to requests for interviews. More than a half-dozen telephone calls to John Burk, listed as the company's spokesman, at numbers distributed by Energy Development Group, weren't returned.

At the March 9 meeting where the plant was announced, Kempthorne praised the proposal. A coal-gasification plant, modeled on a federally bankrolled $609 million, 250-megawatt plant that's been running in Tampa, Fla., since 1997, is what Idaho needs to stay competitive, Kempthorne said.

"The governor wasn't intimately familiar with the history of the company, no. You can't be familiar with everything," spokesman Mike Journee said later. "The governor knows that their proposal is cutting-edge technology."