WASHINGTON – It’s the chilly North vs. the steamy South in a brewing confrontation over a Bush administration proposal to change the way federal energy aid is allocated.

The $1.7 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program helps about 5 million poor households pay their heating and cooling bills. Congress approved $2 billion for the program this year, but $300 million is an emergency fund the White House has not released.

Average grants are about $300, with awards running as low as $150 in the South and as high as $1,200 in New England.

Over the years, about 60 percent of the money has ended up in the Northeast and Midwest.

In his 2003 budget proposal to Congress, President Bush suggested changing the formula to make “grant allocations more equitable.”

The present formula is based on 1980 Census data and low-income households’ heating expenditures. In the mid-1980s Congress changed the law so cooling expenditures also would be counted, but that provision doesn’t kick in unless total finances for the program are more than $1.975 billion.

Bush wants Congress to change the formula to include heating and cooling expenditures and more recent Census data.

“This program does not recognize the fact that extreme heat in the South can be just as dangerous as extreme cold in the North,” Mississippi Gov. Ronnie Musgrove said Friday in a statement. Musgrove chairs the Southern States Energy Board, an interstate compact of 16 states and two territories that works on energy policies.

The problem, said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors’ Association, is not that Bush wants to help Southern states that have been shortchanged. Now, Wolfe said, Connecticut gets enough money to serve 17 percent of its eligible population, compared with Florida’s 2.6 percent.

Wolfe said Bush also wants to cut program allocations by $300 million, so that the poor in the South would benefit at the expense of the poor in the North, he said. “The result is no one is going to have enough money to run a decent program.”

Northern lawmakers, predictably, are opposed to any such change. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., promised Friday to block the plan when it comes before his Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, which has jurisdiction.

“They want to pull even more money away from our coldest states,” said Kennedy.

One solution is to boost overall funding for the program, but prospects aren’t promising, given the tight budget.