Australia Awards 7.8GW of Renewables in Record Tender as Another 5GW Auction Opens

Australia Awards 7.8GW of Renewables in Record Tender as Another 5GW Auction Opens The Capacity Investment Scheme has now selected 58 projects totalling gigawatts of new capacity, with Tender 7 overshooting its 5GW target by more than 50%. Australia awarded 19 renewable energy projects delivering 7.8 gigawatts of generation capacity under Capacity Investment Scheme Tender 7, overshooting the original 5GW target by more than 50%. The tender, which opened in October 2025, attracted enough competitive bids to allow the government to nearly double the planned award volume. The Albanese government described it as the biggest single boost to the country's main electricity grid.^7,5 The scale matters because the CIS is now the primary mechanism driving investment into the National Electricity Market. The scheme has selected 58 projects across its seven tenders so far. Before the ink on Tender 7 dried, the federal government launched the next auction on Monday, seeking another 5 gigawatts of wind and solar. The pace of procurement has accelerated to a point where gigawatt-scale awards are arriving quarterly.⁶ The 19 projects selected will supply enough clean energy to power roughly 4 million homes, according to the government. That framing is political, but the underlying capacity additions are real and contracted. These are not aspirational targets. They are projects with revenue support mechanisms that make them bankable.⁵ The battery storage component is where the commercial signal is sharpest. Edify Energy reached financial close on the Smoky Creek and Guthrie's Gap solar and storage projects in Queensland, combining 720 megawatt-peak of solar with 600MW and 2.4 gigawatt-hours of battery storage. These are the largest solar and battery hybrid projects currently under development in Australia. The pairing of generation with storage addresses the intermittency question directly — these projects can dispatch power when the grid needs it, not just when the sun shines.^4,3 New South Wales is running its own parallel procurement. The state opened Tender 8, its largest renewable energy tender to date, seeking 2.5 gigawatts of new infrastructure under the NSW Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap. The state-level tenders run alongside the federal CIS, creating layered demand signals for developers.² The pipeline is now large enough to have downstream effects on thermal fuel demand. Each gigawatt of solar or wind capacity that enters the NEM displaces marginal gas and coal generation. Australia exports thermal coal from Newcastle and ships LNG from Gladstone. The cross-sector link runs through dispatch order: as renewable capacity grows and storage firms it, the hours during which gas and coal generators run shrink. That affects both domestic wholesale power prices and the volume of coal available for export.⁶ A new gigawatt-scale wind project is also nearing construction, adding to the pipeline of large-format projects that have been slow to move from development to steel-in-ground. The bottleneck in Australian renewables has not been policy ambition or project approvals. It has been construction execution, grid connection timelines, and community consent. Whether the 7.8GW awarded in Tender 7 translates to commissioned megawatts on the timeline the market expects depends on those operational constraints.⁶ China's decision to halt approvals for some new solar projects and cut subsidies to developers is expected to slow its pace of expansion, which could reduce module prices globally by up to 25% according to industry experts. Cheaper panels would lower capital costs for Australian projects awarded under the CIS, improving their economics against contracted revenue floors.¹ The signal to watch is whether construction timelines for Tender 7 projects stay on track through 2027. Australia has a history of awarding large renewable capacity that then stalls in development. If Edify's solar-battery hybrids reach commercial operation on schedule, they will demonstrate that firmed renewables can be delivered at the scale the NEM needs to displace coal baseload during daylight hours and gas peaking into the evening.^3,7