Former FERC Chairman Mark Christie Warns the Electricity Crisis is Here

No one has sounded the alarm louder about the nation’s eroding grid reliability than former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Mark Christie.

We recently had the opportunity to sit down with him to discuss reliability, surging power demand and the urgent need for more dispatchable generating capacity. His timely remarks came as debate rages about the electricity supply crisis and how to meet it. For Christie, the newly announced director of the College of William & Mary’s Law School’s new Center for Energy Law & Policy, years of warnings have now come to a head with remarkably little room for error. As he said, “the crisis of reliability is no longer over the horizon…the crisis is across the street.”

With power demand now soaring from data centers, Christie warns that the nation’s wholesale electricity market structures, “aren’t even remotely capable of meeting it.”

“The reality is, we have to have these dispatchable generating resources,” he says. “And we don’t just need to keep the ones we have, we’ve got to build a lot of new ones.”

For the full interview, that covers everything from soaring demand to fuel security and the importance of dispatchable power, tune in here: