The Exit Interview: Chairman Christie Departs as FERC Faces Pressure Below and Ahead

Originally published for customers July 25, 2025.

What’s the issue?

Chairman Christie presided over his final FERC meeting this week, departing at a time of rising grid stress and regulatory turnover. A potential successor, David LaCerte, has been nominated but lacks significant FERC experience.

Why does it matter?

Christie’s exit comes as FERC faces a complex and quickly shifting regulatory and political landscape. A fully functioning Commission will be critical to navigating these waters.

What’s our view?

Collegiality matters more than pedigree — the eleven floors of FERC career staff can advise LaCerte on the substance. PJM’s tight conditions may build support for new gas generation, and storage could emerge as the next constraint.

Chairman Christie presided over his final FERC meeting this week, departing at a time of rising grid stress and regulatory turnover. A potential successor, David LaCerte, has been nominated but lacks significant FERC experience. Christie’s exit comes as FERC faces a complex and quickly shifting regulatory and political landscape. A fully functioning Commission will be critical to navigating these waters. Collegiality matters more than pedigree — the eleven floors of FERC career staff can advise LaCerte on the substance. PJM’s tight conditions may build support for new gas generation, and storage could emerge as the next constraint.

New Nominee on Deck

President Trump nominated David LaCerte on July 16 to serve the remainder of former Chairman Phillips’s term, which expires June 30, 2026. If confirmed alongside Laura Swett, Republicans would regain a 3-2 majority at FERC. LaCerte stands in sharp contrast to Swett in one key respect: he brings little in the way of energy regulatory experience that would inform his role.

LaCerte currently serves as senior advisor at the Office of Personnel Management, effectively the federal government’s HR division. His prior roles include:

• Managing Director at the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board
• Louisiana Secretary of Veterans Affairs
• Contributor to Project 2025, advocating administrative rollback
• Special counsel at Baker Botts, working on environmental and incident response litigation

He appears to have no evident background in energy markets, infrastructure permitting, or FERC jurisdiction. But that is not necessarily disqualifying. No commissioner arrives fully briefed. All rely heavily on their assistants and on the eleven floors of career staff — engineers, lawyers, economists, and analysts — who carry the substance and bring new appointees up to speed.

What matters more than pedigree or ideology is personal dynamics. Recall the Glick chairmanship when all commissioners brought deep policy fluency, but internal conflict repeatedly stalled progress. LaCerte’s challenge won’t just be learning the law. What we’re watching is whether he can serve effectively with the others in executing it.

While it remains to be seen who will be tapped as Chair, whomever it is has big shoes to fill. Chairman Christie provided a steady hand through multiple transitions, governing under Danly, Glick, and Phillips before taking the gavel himself. He consistently championed ratepayer interests, staff expertise, and institutional integrity, a model of public service worth emulating.

The nomination must move through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee before reaching the floor. With the August recess approaching, a final vote may not happen until the fall.

PJM, Prices, and the Push for New Generation

As Christie gaveled in his final meeting, the gap between generation retirements and new buildout in PJM was again in focus, with market and permitting signals coming into sharp relief. The Commission’s order addressed PJM’s compliance filing under Order Nos. 2023 and 2023-A, but the backdrop was more interesting — PJM’s latest capacity auction hit the market-wide cap of $329.17/MW-day for the 2026–27 delivery year — a 22% increase over the prior year for most zones.

The drivers of this monumental increase are familiar: long interconnection queues, rising data center demand, retirements outpacing new generation, and sustained opposition to new firm generation. The Commission’s order targeted the first of these: an attempt to streamline the interconnection process by shifting from project-specific to cluster-based studies, as we previously covered in Spark or Static? FERC’s New Generator Transmission Interconnection Rule. While the Commission’s approval of PJM’s compliance filing was a contentious and important procedural step, cluster studies are just one piece of the puzzle.

PJM estimated that, without a negotiated market cap, the price would have reached $389/MW-day. That clearing price is a loud signal: new generation is not keeping up with demand. It’s a dynamic Christie has raised repeatedly in his warnings that PJM is operating under “tight conditions,” and that FERC must focus on clearing the way for new, dispatchable capacity.

Natural gas is well-positioned to help, both as baseload and as flexible, peak-shaving capacity. But the billion-dollar question is when state and federal regulators will advance the kind of reforms necessary to incentivize more investor certainty and resulting generation build.

Storage Below the Surface

There were three natural gas items on the agenda this week, but the most notable was an approval for Black Bayou to develop new salt dome storage in Louisiana with 34.7 Bcf of working gas and 18 Bcf of base gas capacity. While the Commission approved the project with relatively little discussion, it was protested, and it arrives amid broader concerns that storage capacity is lagging behind production, LNG buildout, and demand growth, particularly along the Gulf Coast. If the open season results are any indication, demand is strong — they received bids for almost 70 Bcf, more than four times what was offered.

U.S. gas production continues to rise, and LNG export capacity is expected to increase by roughly 10 Bcf/d by decade’s end. But storage development has grown by only 0.1% annually over the last decade.

Since the end of 2016, only a handful of storage projects have applied for and received certificates of public convenience and necessity from FERC, resulting in 85.53 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of new certificated working gas capacity. Additional storage projects have applications pending, as shown in the chart below:

It will likely take at least a year or two for these storage projects’ capacities to become operational based on historical timelines, however.

The mismatch between production and storage hasn’t yet reached crisis levels, but it’s trending toward constraint. If storage doesn’t scale alongside upstream production and downstream offtake, volatility will increase. The other potential area of concern with rising LNG buildout is the threat of disruption from large storms off the Gulf. If a hurricane disrupts LNG offtake shipments for a long enough period, and there isn’t enough storage capacity to absorb the reduced pull, gas supply floods the market and gas prices tank.

Looking Ahead

There’s a lot to think about coming out of this meeting. New leadership is on the horizon. Generation and storage constraints are becoming more visible. Regulators are being asked to navigate the tension between the existential urgency of AI-driven power demand and the persistent opposition to the infrastructure needed to meet it. Regulatory reforms like cluster studies are just beginning to take root, and it remains to be seen whether they’ll shorten timelines fast enough. Meanwhile, the buildout of LNG export capacity and the threat of increasingly severe storms are raising the stakes for reliable, resilient infrastructure.

None of this is cause for panic. But it does call for focus — the kind that comes from better data, sharper analysis, and clear-eyed risk assessment. There’s an opportunity for prosperity in all of this. But making the most of it will require discipline, insight, and a willingness to act.

If you would like help assessing infrastructure risks, interconnection trends, or gas generation opportunities in this shifting landscape, please contact us.