President Donald Trump named Mark Christie as the new chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, giving the senior Republican at the agency a central role in expanding the nation’s electricity and natural gas infrastructure.
“I have emphasized protecting consumers from excessive power bills, meeting the reliability crisis driven by losses of dispatchable generation and failure to build new generation, in the face of rising demand,” Christie wrote on the social media site X.
“Meeting these challenges are my top priorities,” he wrote, “and I have always said that the states must be full partners with FERC in protecting consumers and assuring reliability.”
FERC is an independent agency, but prominent GOP politicians, energy executives and wealthy Big Tech political donors are pressing their cases on energy policy. It remains to be seen how much influence the White House will try to exert on the regulator of natural gas infrastructure and regional electricity markets.
