The Capacity Investment Scheme underwrites revenue for wind, solar and storage projects, which means the Commonwealth carries a contingent liability whose size depends on prices nobody outside the scheme can see.

The disclosure that does happen is genuine and should be recorded as such. After each tender closes, the department publishes the successful projects, their operators, locations, technology and capacity, along with community and First Nations benefit commitments. A reader can establish what is being built and by whom.

What is missing is the price. Not one figure has been published from which the cost of the underwriting can be estimated, and there is no round-level statistic -- a clearing price, a range, a distribution of bids -- of the kind the United Kingdom's Contracts for Difference scheme releases after every allocation round and most European schemes release in some form.

The argument for disclosure is not only accountability. Bidders into a closed scheme have no benchmark, and the procurement literature associates that with higher and more widely dispersed bids than a scheme where past clearing prices are known. If that holds here, secrecy is costing the Commonwealth money on the contracts it is trying to keep cheap.

Tender outcome announcements give projects and capacity. Analysts estimate scheme costs from generation forecasts and wholesale price paths, which produces a range wide enough to accommodate almost any policy conclusion.

Budget papers carry provisions for the scheme in aggregate, not per round.

Checked on 2026-09-01. The published tender outcomes were reviewed and confirmed to carry project, operator, location, capacity and benefit commitments, and no price.

commercial is recorded and treated as genuine, which is why this entry is not scored as fixable without new collection. The scheme agreements are commercial contracts and the Commonwealth cannot unilaterally publish a counterparty's agreed price.

The register's practice with a genuine constraint is to describe the version of the disclosure that would survive it. Here that version is well established elsewhere: aggregate round statistics, published after the round closes, naming no counterparty. The United Kingdom does this as a matter of course. So the honest form of this entry is not that the Commonwealth is hiding prices, but that it has not adopted a disclosure practice its peers treat as routine and that its own contracts would not prevent.

Worth checking next: whether the CIS agreement template contains a disclosure carve-out permitting aggregate publication, and whether the department has committed to any post-round reporting in scheme documentation.

Related: Commonwealth entity annual reports, AusTender contract notices.