The latest and most lucrative bid for the right to develop the West Side rail yards may also be the most short-lived.

An energy company, TransGas Energy Systems, which submitted a $700 million offer Monday for air rights at the 13-acre site, said it does not plan to respond immediately to yesterday’s request for proposals sent by the owner of the rail yards, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The nominal value of the unexpected and conditional offer by TransGas was $100 million more than Madison Square Garden offered and $600 million more than the New York Jets had offered for the air rights, or development rights. But the president of Trans-Gas, Adam Victor, said: “We are not submitting anything further until we meet with the MTA.”

The cash-strapped agency, which is run by the state, hopes to sell the air rights to raise money to plug a multibillion-dollar budget gap in its capital plan for the next five years. The RFP sent out yesterday was in response to calls for an open and competitive bidding process meant to increase the price of the development rights. Mr. Victor said his “non-conforming bid” would do just that.

“We believe it’s up to the management of the MTA to weigh the benefits of a non-conforming bid against the paradigm they set forth in the RFP,” he said.

But the MTA will not entertain any proposals that do not conform to the RFP, a spokesman said.

“We are delivering to interested parties copies of the RFP,” the spokesman, Brian Dolan, said. “It is a process we put forward, and we will not entertain any non-conforming proposals.”

Mr. Dolan said the MTA has no intention of meeting with TransGas. Mr.Victor said he remained confident that the MTA would see that his company’s offer – which deals with electricity as much as it deals with real estate – was unusual enough that it could not conform to the normal proposals solicited by the MTA, but was a compelling offer nonetheless.

“On something of this import they might not like what we have to say but I think they will want to meet with us. I could be wrong but I don’t think so,” Mr. Victor said. “If they refuse to meet with us or refuse to discuss it we will have a tough decision to make.”

Both the Jets and Madison Square Garden said they would re-submit their proposals once they received the MTA’s guidelines. The deadline for bids is March 21. The MTA, in its request for proposals, said a winning proposal would come at the least economic and environmental risk to the MTA and at the same time give the greatest economic and civic benefit to the city and the surrounding community.

The bid for the site by TransGas was unusual because the company announced no plans to develop the site. Unlike the New York Jets’ plan to build a New York Sports and Convention Center featuring a 75,000-seat football stadium that would also serve as the city’s crown jewel in its bid for the 2012 Olympics, and unlike Madison Square Garden’s recently announced proposal for a high-density housing complex over the rail yards, TransGas sought to use the property as “collateral” to secure a 20-year power contract the MTA currently has with the New York Power Authority, Mr. Victor said.

Since 2001, TransGas has been vying unsuccessfully to build a power plant on the Brooklyn waterfront, Mr. Victor said.

Mayor Bloomberg told reporters yesterday that TransGas declined an offer from the city to build the power plant at another location.

A representative from an organization that has worked with the community in Williamsburg that opposes TransGas’s plans for a power plant there said the proposal Monday was merely an attempt to circumvent community review with a backroom deal.

“It was a thinly veiled effort to leverage their Brooklyn power plant proposal by spending 700 million for the rail yards,” an environmental policy analyst with NYPIRG, Jason Babbie, said. “Now TransGas will have to follow the same rules as any developer and go through the process.”

The proposal from TransGas was met yesterday with derision from the Jets president, Jay Cross, who took the opportunity to announce upcoming events, notably the annual Whitney M. Young Jr. Football Classic, for a stadium that has yet to be approved, let alone built.

“We have descended from the sublime to the ridiculous,” Mr. Cross said of the TransGas offer. The Jets executive said the domed stadium, where the team hopes to begin play in 2009, will create thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in revenue.

The RFP posted on the Internet late yesterday is 25 pages long.

Real-estate experts said the solicitation, by creating uniform guidelines and conditions, would allow for bids to be easily compared and a market value for the site to be reached.