Charlot Zahra
Enemalta will be changing all its electricity meters next year in order to ensure that energy consumption is adequately metred and to discourage tampering.
Minister for Rural Affairs and Infrastructure George Pullicino yesterday presented the National Energy Efficiency Plan (NEEP) to the press, explaining that a pilot project will be starting as from next March.
At the same time, he said that Enemalta engineers will be visiting households to perform energy audits of those households to calculate possible energy losses both from the appliances themselves as well as from large open windows and lack of proper insulation in households, among other things.
Asked about the localities that will be included in the trial, Pullicino said that he did not know. “This is an Enemalta project and we are piggybacking on it,” as part of the NEEP.
“Whoever has a smart meter will be able to gauge much better how much improvement the energy conservation programme will make,” Pullicino said.
Questioned as to whether the new electricity meter will be a pre-paid one, where one has to insert a smart card to get access to electricity, as was introduced in the UK, Pullicino said the system “does not exclude” it.
“As far as I know, the system will give the possibility of topping in advance, but it is not necessary,” Pullicino claimed.
A month ago, on 6 October sister paper Illum had revealed for the first time that Enemalta was going to change the electricity meters in Malta and Gozo after signing a contact with technology giant IBM for the provision of an Automatic Meter Management system to the Corporation.
The “smart” meters will enable Enemalta to do away with the meter readers as the information about the energy consumption of subscribers would be transmitted to the Corporation directly across the electricity grid.
Asked whether the Government will be conducting energy audits on those 30,000 households that currently receive the energy benefit, Pullicino said: “In the programme of audits that we will be making, those 30,000 families will be definitely included in our target.
“However we should not target specifically those families. I think that we should first target those families that consume a lot of electricity, irrespective of their income. We are mainly interested in reducing consumption,” Pullicino said.
Among the measures contemplated in the NEEP for households include the promotion of solar water heaters, subsidy schemes for roof insulation to buildings, and the promotion of energy saving lamps.
For the public sector, the plan contemplates that government ministries and departments should take concrete actions to promote energy saving initiatives in their respective entities.
To this effect, part of the assessment of Permanent Secretaries performance will be based on the performance of the respective Green Leader in each Ministry and Department.
Moreover, a joint task force has been set out between the ADT and Enemalta to identify those areas which have excessive street lighting and reducing lighting to a more acceptable level.
Among the measures contemplated for industry in the NEEP include the introduction of a support schemes for industry and SMEs, and energy efficiency promotion in the tourism industry.
In this respect, the European Commission will allow member states to ban incandescent lamps as from 2010.
Under EU Directive 2006/32/EEC, Member States are required to reduce 1% of their energy consumption at end-user level each year till 2016. Pullicino said government would be introducing a carbon offsetting programme for Malta as from next year.

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