This story was updated at 4:30 p.m. EDT.
The lone Republican on the nation’s top energy regulator pushed back against four New York Republicans who had urged the commission to quickly finalize a pending proposal that could generate huge amounts of renewable power.
Mark Christie, who serves on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, told the House Republicans in a letter last week it would be “grossly unfair” for FERC to “force consumers” in other states to pay for wind, solar and other renewable projects that their locally elected leaders never got the chance to vote for.
“While I absolutely support the people of New York or any other state in their right to choose any energy policies they want regarding preferred power resources, it would be wrong both as a matter of policy, as well as law, for FERC to use a transmission planning rule to force the costs, for example, of New Jersey’s policy-driven offshore wind projects onto consumers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, or other states without the explicit consent of those states,” he wrote.
