Capital Expenditure Incentive Guidelines Review 2025 - Explanatory Statement for Draft Guidelines

On 16 May, we published our proposed amendments to the Capital Expenditure Incentive Guidelines (Guidelines).

The release of the proposed amendments to the Guidelines follows the completion of our first round of consultation on the matters outlined in our consultation paper. Information on how we considered stakeholder feedback in making the proposed amendments to the Guidelines can be found in the explanatory note accompanying the draft amendments.

Our amendments aim to address:

• the Australian Energy Market Commission’s (AEMC) amending rule on managing ISP project uncertainty through targeted ex-post reviews, which requires us to update our Guidelines to enable us to carry out separate targeted ex-post review for Integrated System Plan (ISP) projects and non-ISP projects;

• exclusions from the application of the CESS in certain circumstances; and

• adjustments to the CESS to accommodate abandoned ISP projects.