By Kennedy Maize
Outgoing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Mark Christie yesterday (June 26) praised the performance of the electric system during the week’s massive “heat dome” that blanketed most of the eastern U.S. (and half of the country’s population). The regional transmission operators and the conventional utility systems faced very difficult circumstances and “got through without any major load shed or rolling outages,” he said at FERC’s monthly public meeting.
“All systems were tight, very tight in some instances,” Christie said. Grid operators did a good job managing “a very tough weather event.” The grid operators were “all running resources flat out pedal-to-the-metal. Nobody went over the edge.”
Christie also took the opportunity to reprise a theme that has been a constants during his FERC tenure: resource adequacy. Speaking to reporters after the meeting, he said that the nation “is simply not building [generation] fast enough and keeping the generation we need to keep.” System operators were “running generators that needed to go on maintenance” during the record-setting heat wave.
Looking at the performance of the giant PJM regional transmission operator during the heat assault, the nation’s largest RTO, Christie said the grid system hit a peak generation at 6 p.m. Monday of 161 gigawatts. That consisted of 44% gas-fired generation, 20% nuclear, 19% coal, solar at 5% and wind at 3%. PJM’s reserve capacity was 10 GW, “not at zero but tight.”
That compares to last winter’s PJM peak on Jan. 20 of 145 GW of load: 44% gas, 22% nuclear, 22% coal, no solar, and 2.4 GW of wind.
PJM said demand response, aka DR – reducing electric load, once generally known as “peak shaving” – played a significant role in surviving the early summer elements, Christie noted. “DR doesn’t serve load, it reduces load.” PJM’s peak “would have been higher without DR.”
“You never know about the next time,” Christie said, “and there is going to be a next time. That’s my line, and we’ve got to have more resources.”
Asked about the new Texas law that gives the statewide Electric Reliability Council of Texas the authority to order large, non-critical electric consumers such as AI data centers to shed load in emergencies, Christie said, “Texas owns the grid. Interconnection of customer load to a grid is under state law, not federal. Texas is perfectly within its jurisdiction.”
The veteran state regulator added that “generation mix is under state control. FERC doesn’t license or permit a single generating unit.” PJM, for example, faces the challenge that 13 different states and the District of Columbia “have very divergent policies about what generation they want. PJM has to balance all these competing states.” The same is true of the large midwestern RTO, the Midwestern Independent System Operator (MISO), which also performed well in the scorching early summer.
The FERC meeting also featured a presentation by Mark Lauby of the North American Electric Reliability Corp. on the April 28 grid failure that blacked out Portugal and Spain for up to 16 hours. The NERC analysis rejected the early explanations of the blackout, blaming the heavy presence of solar on the Spanish grid and a loss of frequence control as a result.
According to NERC, the problem was operational – loss of voltage control by the grid operators – not engineering. He said the operators didn’t understand what they were facing as they tried to smooth out cascading voltage oscillations.
The grid was “lightly loaded” at the time of the incident, Lauby said. The Spanish system suffered from “weak grid conditions – higher voltage sensitivity to network change. What’s more important, the U.S. has well-established procedures in place that mean what happened in Spain won’t happen here.”
As for the role of solar, Luby noted that, unlike the U.S., “in Spain, solar photovoltaics are not allowed by law to provide reactive power support” to the grid. That’s not the case in the North American grid.
Christie also touched on his remaining days at FERC. When the Trump administration designated him chairman in January, it was clear his five-year term was ending June 30. When Trump in early June designated Vinson & Elkins energy lawyer Laura V. Swett to replace Christie on the commission and as chairman, it was no real surprise. FERC commissioners traditionally serve only one term.
Under law, Christie can continue while the nomination is formally given to the Senate, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee approves the nomination, and the full Senate agrees. Those events are unlikely to happen quickly.
Christie said he expects to wield the FERC gavel in commission’s July public meeting, meaning he will be a full FERC participant during the month. It’s a good bet that the Swett nomination won’t clear in August, either. FERC does not hold an August public meeting, so Christie, who is very popular at the agency, may be around for the rest of the summer.
Nominee Swett, 40, is a FERC veteran. After graduating from law school at Georgetown in 2011, she served for four years at Washington’s Morgan, Lewis & Bockius law firm, where she worked on cases before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Labor until 2014. She then joined FERC’s Office of Enforcement. In that job, she was FERC’s liaison with the California Independent System Operator.
In 2017 she became an advisor to Kevin McIntyre, Trump’s first appointment as FERC chairman. He stepped down in October 2018 as a result of brain cancer and died in January 2019. He was replaced as FERC Chairman by Neil Chatterjee.
Swett became an advisor to Commissioner Bernard McNamee in 2018, serving for a year. Swett then joined Steptoe & Johnson for three years before spending six months at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. She signed on at Vinson & Elkins in February 2023.
The Quad Report: to subscribe, for back issues, and a searchable archive.