Watch his remarks here: https://youtu.be/Hwto9ucOp40
On July 24, members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) testified before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on their fiscal year 2025 budget. During the hearing, FERC Commissioner Mark Christie continues to sound the alarm on looming reliability challenges, saying that the U.S. electrical grid “is heading for potentially catastrophic consequences.” Below are selected excerpts from his remarks:
“The core threat is two-fold: On the power supply side, dispatchable generating resources, even with many years of useful life remaining, are retiring far too quickly and in quantities that threaten our ability to keep the lights on. The supply problem is not the addition of intermittent resources such as wind and solar, but the far too rapid subtraction of dispatchable resources, especially coal and gas.”
“Further, the nation’s largest regional grid operators have made crystal clear that the Environmental Protection Agency’s power-plant regulations, which have now been finalized, will make this already dire situation much worse by forcibly accelerating the retirement of the vast majority of the remaining coal fleet and making it extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible, to build the new combined-cycle natural gas generation units that will be too essential as baseload generation resources to meet the rising power demand.”
“To cite just one example of the threat that is typical among grid operators: PJM – the largest grid operator in the country in terms of consumers served (load) – warned last year that PJM faced the likelihood of losing 40 gigawatts or more of generation capacity by 2030 through early retirements of generating units. Most of this retiring capacity is dispatchable generation, primarily coal and gas. Meanwhile, PJM faces unprecedented load growth due to the proliferation of data centers, for example, in my own home state of Virginia, home of “Data Center Alley.””
Commissioner Christie’s sober remarks underscore the importance of these issues and provide recognition of pressing challenges to electric reliability and affordability that deserve bipartisan attention from policymakers.