The White House announced today that it intends to nominate Virginia State Corporation Commission chair Mark Christie, and clean energy advocate Allison Clements to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Christie, who is a non-partisan SCC chairman, would fill the Republican seat being vacated by Bernard McNamee, whose term expired June 30. He has remained on the commission pending a replacement. Clements would fill a vacant Democratic seat on the commission. Federal law requires that FERC’s five members consist of three members of the president’s party and two members of the opposite party.
Christie would join Chairman Neil Chatterjee and James Danly, former FERC general counsel, on the GOP side, while Clements would join Richard Glick as the Democratic members. Neither Christie nor Clements appear to have been chosen for any particularly ideological or substantive bent.
Christie, who grew up in the devastated coal mining town of Welch, W.Va., was elected to the SCC in 2004, when Democrat Mark Warner, now a senator, was governor but the legislature was controlled by Republicans. During his SCC term, he was president of the Organization of PJM State, and was on their board for more than a decade. He was also president of the Mid-Atlantic Conference of State Utility Regulators.
Clements is the founder of Goodgrid LLC, a consulting firm in Salt Lake City. She spent two years directing the energy markets program at the Energy Foundation, and before that, worked for a decade at the Natural Resources Defense Council environmental group, as corporate council and director of the Sustainable FERC Project. Sen. Joe Manchin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, has long been pushing for her nomination to FERC, trying but failing to pair the nomination to that of McNamee.
It’s unlikely that either nominee will generate significant opposition, although it may take a burdened and glacially slow Senate to get around to a confirmation, assuming the White House, also not known for expeditious action on nominees, sends the formal nominations to the Senate before the November election.
— Kennedy Maize