MONTPELIER, Vt. – The organization that dispatches electricity around New England is proposing a new system of payments to generators that state regulators say could add billions of dollars to the region’s power costs in the coming years.

ISO-New England has asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to implement a new charge in the wholesale power market that regulators in the six states say could add $13 billion to consumers’ costs for power in the next five years.

Officials at the Holyoke, Mass.-based ISO, which manages New England’s power markets, argue that the new payments are needed to encourage generators to stay in business and to encourage construction of new generators, especially in parts of the region that are short on power.

The purpose of the “locational installed capacity,” or LICAP, charge is “to send out a signal to the marketplace where new generating resources are needed,” said ISO spokeswoman Ellen Foley. Those investments are crucial to the long-term reliability of the region’s power grid, Foley said.

An administrative law judge at FERC is expected next week to recommend a decision to the commission. A final decision is expected by early September, Foley said, with implementation tentatively set for next Jan. 1.

State utility commissioners and energy office officials around the region said Tuesday that they support ISO’s efforts to ensure long-term reliability of the power grid. But they said they did not believe the ISO plan would do that.

“Obviously we fully support measures that ensure reliability in New England … but this proposal is unlikely to achieve that objective,” said Thomas Getz, chairman of the New Hampshire Public Utilities Commission and president of the New England Conference of Public Utilities Commissioners.

Getz added that the “proposal reflects a surprising insensitivity to the financial burden that its plan will have on retail consumers throughout the region.”

Foley said the new charge is designed to address problems that have crept into New England’s wholesale power market since it was deregulated in the late 1990s. A power plant building boom has added 9,500 megawatts to the region’s capacity in recent years, but many of those power plants, built for easy access to natural gas supplies and big transmission lines, are not where demand is highest.

Foley cited northeastern Massachusetts, the Boston area and southwestern Connecticut as areas where system reliability has been a concern because transmission bottlenecks make it difficult to get power there.

Wholesale power markets charge separately for capacity and energy; the ISO proposal calls for setting up five pricing zones for capacity that would provide a premium for existing power plants to keep operating and new ones to open in the areas affected by bottlenecks.

Hans Mertens, chief engineer for the Vermont Department of Public Service, said state regulators believe the ISO plan is misguided in at least two respects.

He said it is too generous, in that it applies to generators that are not in areas where reliability is an issue, and will represent a simple “transfer of wealth” to some generation companies that are getting along fine without it.

Mertens said the ISO pricing plan also does not provide enough certainty in the way that it is structured to get bankers to finance new power plant construction.

Paul Alfonso, chairman of the Massachusetts Department of Telecommunications and Energy, said he is optimistic that a balance can be found between reliability and higher power costs. He added that “now is not the time to burden our consumers with additional costs without measurable benefits.”