CONCORD, N.H. – Kris Pastoriza doesn’t want to see those power line towers. Like many other North Country residents, she has a long list of reasons.

The proposed towers would carry transmission lines starting from Canada along a 140-mile route from northern to central New Hampshire. They would be part of the Northern Pass Project, which would bring hydroelectric power to customers in New England. The companies working on the $1.1 billion project started seeking permits for it last year and hope to have it running in 2015.

When it was first announced in October, the 1,200-megawatt project — enough to supply over a million homes — was seen by many New Hampshire residents as good news. It was promoted as a project that would provide low-cost renewable energy, supply construction jobs and bring in more tax revenue for the state and for the 30 communities where the lines and terminals would be built.

Much of the route would follow existing rights of way, but a 40-mile section that would come through the northernmost part of the state has many residents there worried about an eyesore that would cause falling property values and a drop in tourism. Some wonder if the project is really needed at all.

“I don’t know what the good part is. What would be the good part?” said Pastoriza, a stay-at-home mother who’s part of a group called Bury the Northern Pass, one of several formed in opposition. Their take: If the project can’t be stopped, why not bury the lines underground?

“It eliminates the problem of the horrible ugliness of those massive towers,” she said.

“It really does go back to cost versus benefit,” said Ed Legge, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington, D.C., trade group that represents utilities. “If there’s not an operational reason for it, sometimes aesthetics win the day; sometimes it doesn’t.”

The companies working on the Northern Pass say burying the lines isn’t feasible. They say it would be costly and possibly do more harm to the environment.

“It’s simply more expensive to dig up the earth, to do the trenching, to create the many substations to create the access roads necessary to access that area, to blast the granite,” said Martin Murray, spokesman for Public Service of New Hampshire, a subsidiary of Northeast Utilities, one of the project’s collaborators. The others are NSTAR and HQ Hydro Renewable Energy, a subsidiary of Hydro-Quebec.

Supporters of burying the lines wonder if the lines could be run under the Connecticut River. They point to a hydro and wind power project in New York state that would use underwater cable.