Mark Christie to chair FERC, focus on affordability and reliability

By EPN Staff

President Donald Trump’s appointment of Mark C. Christie, a longtime consumer energy advocate, to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission underscores the shift to a greater emphasis on reliability and affordability at the nation’s lead energy regulator.

Christie, who succeeds Willie L. Phillips as chairman of the five-member commission, has served as a FERC commissioner since 2021. He spent the previous 16 years on the Virginia State Corporation Commission, the commonwealth’s public utility regulatory authority. Christie also has served as president of the Organization of PJM States (OPSI) and president of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Regulatory Commissioners (MACRUC).

Why it matters

Christie has spent years extolling the importance of reliable and affordable power as others emphasized the build-out of renewable systems and mandates, and he has implored federal and state utility regulators to protect the public from excessive costs and power failures.

“A close partnership between FERC and the states is absolutely essential to address these problems,” he said last week.

In May 2024, Christie drew attention after casting the lone dissenting vote on a transmission planning and cost allocation rule approved by the FERC majority. He lambasted the proposal for ordering transmission planning over a 20-year horizon through a design that masked its effect of circumventing Congress, ignoring states and spending trillions of consumers’ dollars to “serve political, corporate and other special-interest agendas that were never enacted into law.”

“So despite the final rule’s disingenuous claims to the contrary,” Christie wrote, “the intent and effect of this shell game is to enable the costs of corporate and public policy-driven projects to be socialized across an entire multi-state region and thus shifted onto consumers in states that never agreed to bear such costs.”

Deeper context

Christie is widely respected in Virginia and has been recognized as “a ‘little c conservative’ who… would bring a good state perspective to FERC.”

In September 2024, he delivered a keynote address at an event in Williamsburg, Virginia, on infrastructure and economic development. During his remarks, he warned about skyrocketing energy demands colliding with policy-driven closures of dispatchable generation.

As a judge on Virginia’s SCC, Christie often crafted opinions that reflected frustration with the rush toward renewables without regard for reliability or affordability.

A notable Virginia case

In 2018, the SCC – including Christie – affirmed Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) plans, expressing misgivings about the prudency of the policy but deferring to the General Assembly’s support for the project.

“The Commission finds – as a purely factual matter based on this record – that the proposed CVOW Project would not be deemed prudent as that term has been applied by this Commission in its long history of public utility regulation or under any common application of the term. The Commission further finds, however, that as a matter of law the new statutes governing this case subordinate the factual analysis to the legislative intent and public policy clearly set forth in the statutes quoted above and, thus, the instant Petition should be – and is hereby – approved.”

The Wall Street Journal flagged the “scorching order,” praising the commission’s effort to illustrate the financial costs of the project and a case that “could hardly be improved as an illustration of environmental logrolling.”