Mark Christie comes to his new job as chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission having spent years developing his thoughts on the Eastern grid operator plagued by spiraling costs and tightening power supplies.
The FERC chair prides himself on bluntly assessing PJM, which serves 65 million Americans in the Great Lakes and mid-Atlantic regions. Its longer-term capacity market is “Rube Goldberg-esque.” PJM is anything but a free market, he says, and it suffers from “hopeless complexity.”
“Every ‘fix’ renders the capacity market construct more incomprehensible,” he wrote in a 2024 concurrence. “One could even make a credible argument that its sheer complexity renders it unjust and unreasonable.”
Christie’s elevation to FERC chair comes as the commission is under pressure to address tighter power supplies and soaring costs inside PJM territory. From Ohio to northern Virginia, the expanding footprint of data centers and high-tech manufacturing is driving up electricity demand, just as coal and gas plant retirements keep supplies tight. PJM has indicated that if nothing changes to bring more power on the grid, power shortages could come as early as 2027.
