With the proliferation of high-energy data centers outpacing the supply of reliable electric power in Virginia, has some advice for federal and state electric utility regulators as he leaves his job as chairman of the : don’t forget about the people who pay the bills.
It’s advice that Christie, an Ashland resident who previously held key positions in Virginia government, took to heart after his first major utility rate hearing before the , which he joined in 2004 and served on for 17 years. As he left the hearing with Judge Ted Morrison, a fellow commissioner who had served 20 years in the Virginia House of Delegates, he remarked on how many people had filled the Richmond courtroom.
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“Ted said, ‘That room was full of lawyers and lobbyists for the parties who make money from what we do in this case,’†Christie recalled in an interview at his office in Washington, D.C. “’The people who pay the bills, the Virginians who pay the bills, were not in that room. Don’t you ever forget the people who were not in the room.’â€
President Donald Trump elevated Mark Christie to chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in January, then abruptly announced his replacement in June. Christie was a longtime member of Virginia’s State Corporation Commission.
Christie turned 72 on Friday, his last day at FERC, as the agency is known, but he had not planned to retire from the job. President Donald Trump, who initially appointed Christie to the commission at the end of his first presidential term, had elevated him to serve as chairman in January, but then abruptly announced his replacement in early June without explanation to Christie or the public.
“I heard from a reporter,†Christie said. “I hadn’t heard anything from the White House and still haven’t.â€
The White House press office has not responded to repeated inquiries about the decision to replace Christie with Washington energy attorney Laura Swett.
Christie, a former counsel and policy director for then-Gov. George Allen, doesn’t question Trump’s decision.
“The president has the discretion to appoint whoever he wants and not reappoint,†he said. “That’s his discretion and that’s his decision.â€
Data centers
Christie’s departure comes at a pivotal time for national and state energy policy, especially in Virginia. It faces an exponentially growing demand for electricity because of the data center industry that has taken root in Northern Virginia and now is spreading across the state.
“Virginia is ground zero for data centers for the planet,†Christie said. “There are more data centers, more data center capacity in the commonwealth of Virginia than any other political entity on the face of the Earth.â€
Providing data centers with electricity, especially for energy-intensive artificial intelligence computer servers, is going to come with big costs for public utilities, such as Dominion Energy. They will have to upgrade the power grid with transmission lines and substations to connect with data centers, but Christie said the larger challenge will be generating enough electricity to meet the demand.
“Whether they build it or they buy it, the cost is going to be huge,†he said.
Christie said his biggest concern is who will pay for the cost of that power. It’s an issue in a Dominion rate case pending at the SCC, with the utility proposing to create a separate rate class for data centers to pay their fair share of the additional costs.
“We have to seek fairness,†he said in an interview with Semafor, a global online news organization, in June.
“The retired woman living on Social Security, she should not have cost shifted onto her from the data centers,†he said.
Deregulation ‘fiasco’
Data center demand isn’t the only challenge facing Virginia and 12 other states that buy wholesale power supplies under PJM, which operates the regional power grid from the Mid-Atlantic through the Upper Midwest and manages its power capacity market. Virginia joined PJM in 2004, Christie’s first year on the SCC, after the state had begun deregulating its electric utility business the previous decade.
Mark Christie, left, served on the Virginia State Corporation Commission for nearly 17 years, from 2004 to 2021. Here he is shown with then-Chairman Ted Morrison (center) and Clinton Miller.
Two years later, with Christie serving as chairman, the SCC wrote a letter to then-Gov. Tim Kaine and then-Sen. Tommy Norment, R-James City, who was leading a legislative panel on “electric utility restructuring,†about the impending peril to ratepayers in Virginia. The letter declared deregulation a failure because “competition for retail electricity customers in Virginia has been and remains virtually non-existent.â€
The commission also expressed concerns about the viability of the PJM regional wholesale market and warned of a potentially huge increase in electricity costs for ratepayers with the scheduled expiration of caps on utility rates for customers. The next year, the state imposed a new form of regulation on electric utilities, proposed by Dominion.
“Deregulation was a fiasco,†said Christie, who had been part of policy discussions on how to handle the issue in 1997 while working for Allen.
Unlike other states, Virginia never deregulated power generation, so Dominion and other utilities could still build power plants and pay for them through rates. It also was able to take advantage of plentiful power supplies from Pennsylvania and other states in the PJM market, but he said those supplies have almost disappeared because of the early retirement of fossil-fueled plants and the lack of new generation to effectively replace it.
As a result, Christie said Virginia now imports more power than any state in order to serve what he called “this unprecedented load growth.â€
When he served on the SCC, he said, “We built in Virginia, but we weren’t building for this, and now this is here. And now, we have to face the fact that we’re going to need a lot of generation.â€
Christie declined to comment on a sharply worded letter last month to PJM from Gov. Glenn Youngkin and eight other governors in the region. They faulted the operator’s “inability to connect new resources to its grid and engage in effective long-term transmission planning†to the detriment of their states. In its reply, PJM cited a comment by Christie, who had called criticisms of the operator “misplaced†because state policies had contributed to the challenges the regional market faces.
Things ‘he would not do’
Richmond political analyst Bob Holsworth said Christie seems a perfect fit for Trump’s push to expand the supply of energy, particularly fueled by fossil fuels and nuclear rather than solar, wind and other renewable sources.
“He made clear by his actions that he is in ideological agreement, but there were certain things he would not do,†said Holsworth, who previously hired Christie to teach part time at Virginia Commonwealth University for 20 years. (Christie also taught classes in utility law and regulation at the University of Virginia Law School.)
Foremost, Christie sought to protect the 1,500 employees at FERC from demands by the Department of Government Efficiency, which Trump created by executive order to slash the federal workforce through a combination of buyouts, deferred resignations and layoffs.
When DOGE demanded that federal employees tell the Office of Personnel Management what they had done the previous week, the chairman began writing detailed biweekly accounts of the agency’s accomplishments, which he said were significant.
“I am very proud of those letters,†he said.
Christie cited one email “from the same DOGE crowd†that he said advised FERC employees, “’We’ve had a lot of questions about the offer of an early retirement. You should take it because you will give up your low-productivity government job and get a high-productivity job in the private sector.’
“And this went to all our employees, including employees who were working on the very permits for gas pipelines and (liquefied natural gas) facilities that this administration wants to get built,†he said.
Employees still complied with the demand, he said. “I wasn’t going to tell them not to do it because of any possible negative blowback.â€
Ultimately, FERC — which is not taxpayer funded — avoided any layoffs and instead trimmed the workforce about 6% by attrition, along with 55 employees who took early retirement.
‘An independent streak’
“One thing I learned in the Marine Corps is, if you take care of the troops, the troops will take care of you,†he said.
Steve Haner, who writes about energy policy for the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank, said he has known Christie for 40 years.
“He’s always had an independent streak,†Haner said. “He’s always been willing to say exactly what he thinks. He’s always had a strong loyalty to his staff.â€
Christie holds a particular reverence for the SCC, created in 1902 as an independent body in the state Constitution. Unlike FERC, the Virginia commission is not controlled by the executive branch and the governor cannot fire its commissioners, whom the General Assembly elects.
Since he became chairman of FERC in January, he said his message has been, “I come from the Virginia commission, where we had several principles, one of which is we always follow the law — and we’re going to follow the law under my chairmanship here.â€
“In Virginia, we would never allow an ex parte communication to determine a case, and we’re not going to let that happen here,†he said, referring to backdoor communications meant to influence decisions.
“Whether that set well or not, I don’t know.â€
