If anyone still doubted the extent of the energy crisis currently gripping Malta, this week’s events should surely put paid to any remaining uncertainty.
On Wednesday at around 6am, the entire island’s electricity supply was suspended for several hours following the umpteenth explosion at the Marsa Power Station – now approaching its sixth decade of operation, having been purchased (already obsolete) shortly after the end of World War II.
The blast was heard in several parts of the South of Malta, and the resulting blackout affected some areas until 11:10am, by which time power was fully restored to all parts of the island. Though by no means the most serious incident of its kind, Wednesday’s blackout was nonetheless a timely reminder of Malta’s unique vulnerability when it comes to energy provision... despite literally hundreds of millions invested by the government in an entirely inadequate “new” power station at Delimara.
It also called to mind the three similar outages we experienced in as many weeks last July: the longest lasting a staggering eight hours, and costing Maltese businesses an estimated €10 million in losses.
Then as now, the State-owned monopoly Enemalta stopped short of assuming responsibility for the latest inconvenience caused by its own obsolete technology – limiting itself to a largely insubstantial apology, and leaving consumers with no choice but to continue paying exorbitant rates to a corporation which is manifestly incapable of delivering the paid-for service to any satisfactory standard.
Coupled with revelations in our newspaper today – i.e., that the Marsa Power Station, for all its faults will still be required, unless there is substantial progress on the Malta-Sicily cable link; and that for the same reason, connection to the Sicily grid will now be necessary if Marsa is ever to be phased out at all – the implications are to say the least worrying.
Contrary to popular belief, Malta is not and cannot be self-sufficient in the energy provision stakes in the foreseeable future; and this in turn bespeaks the colossal failure of the current Nationalist administration, which rose to power in 1987 on a promise to solve the dire energy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s once and for all.
On another level, Wednesday’s incident also illustrates the astonishing lack of transparency with which Enemalta is allowed to operate, despite the fact that Malta has been an EU member state for five years. Unlike July’s eight-hour blackout, this time round no technical explanation was forthcoming to account for the explosion. Instead, the State-owned energy provider’s chairman, Ing. Alex Tranter, took the extraordinary initiative to announce that he was unable to take questions about the incident... because it was currently the subject of a police investigation and a magisterial inquiry.
Referring (somewhat obscurely) to “reports in the media”, Tranter questioned whether it was a “coincidence” that this latest fault developed at a time when Enemalta was being discussed in Parliament, and the day after he himself had conceded a rare television interview on the same subject.
By inference, Tranter seemed to be implying that the power outage may have been the result of deliberate sabotage – a serious aspersion, which deserves to be substantiated by equally serious evidence.
Later, Tranter’s extravagant “sabotage” theory would be publicly rubbished by Enemalta’s own technicians, and the corporation chairman put on the defensive by a General Workers’ Union statement which deplored his “insinuation” that Enemalta employees may have perpetrated a “terrorist” attack.
But while these fanciful accusations were bandied about in all directions, nobody at the Enemalta Corporation was on hand to answer any of the multifarious questions such a serious incident would provoke in any self-respecting EU member State.
Incredibly, Alex Tranter himself was incommunicado for the two days after the event – having left the island the day after releasing his statement last Wednesday on private business, his spokesperson said. Surely this is not a serious way to handle what can only be described as an energy crisis of the kind we thought we’d left behind us in 1987.
The country deserves a better account of the antics of its only energy provider... especially if it intends to be taken seriously as an attractive destination for investment in Information & Communications Technology.
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