The tender process for the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) is set to be streamlined, with Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, announcing a reform to the program in his speech at Australian Energy Week 2025.
Minister Bowen addressed the attendees at the event in his first major speech since the Federal Election.
“Over the past three years, there has been a massive acceleration of investment and deployment [of renewable energy], with solar capacity and output up by around 50 per cent over three years,” he said.
“In our first term, we saw 15GW of renewable energy added to the grid – that’s more than three Snowy Hydro schemes worth of renewables.
“By continuing to reduce emissions in electricity…our projections show that we can reduce emissions by more than half of what they are today, by 2030.”
Minister Bowen said there was a lot of catching up to do over the last decade, and that it’s now time to knuckle down and get on with the job of delivering a better, fairer, more reliable, more affordable, lower emissions energy system for Australia.
He also discussed Australia’s energy sovereignty, and how the CIS was delivering on this front.
“We need to get more renewables and storage online for a more affordable, more reliable, more sovereign energy system,” he said.
“In three short years, we’ve seen the CIS unlock record levels of investment in Australia’s energy and get us on track to meet 82 per cent renewables by 2030.
“To date, we’ve launched six tenders worth more than half the total required capacity: 12.3GW of generation and 6GW of dispatchable, which will support capital investment of $37 billion.
“These tenders have all been consistently – and usually massively – oversubscribed. I take as a great vote of confidence in our energy system, in the renewable transformation, and in the CIS itself.”
Minister Bowen then announced a reform to the program, which is expected to significantly streamline the tender process.
“Today, I’m announcing that we will be reducing the amount of time it takes to finalise the tender outcomes to around six months, from the current nine months. We’re going to do this by moving to a one stage tender process, rather than the current two stages.
“This will result in faster decisions, and it will be good for everyone.
“The beauty of the CIS is twofold. It provides industry certainty, but also we can learn as we go and improve it as we develop it, and that’s what we’ll continue to do now.”
