Another invidious European record lies within our grasp: in a matter of days we will be the EU member country with the highest water and electricity bills. Unions, employers, industrialists and hoteliers are howling in anticipated pain. The rest of us are trying to imagine what it could be like to be in a worse situation than we already are on our energy bills.
Reality has flashed before us in all its horror, a nightmare beast walking abroad. In our violent response the Government is blamed and the MRA pilloried. Charges of incompetence and inefficiency are laid at every available door. It is as it should be.
What struck me most in all this is that we have suddenly gone from cloud cuckoo land on energy costs to where we have always been in one tremendous leap. We have always been 100% dependent on imported oil, the most expensive raw material for electricity generation. Unlike most other countries, we depend on electricity to power our reverse osmosis plants through which we produce half of the public water supply at the cost of 10-15% of all the electricity generated in the country. Have we had the world’s most efficient generation systems until just now?
The question is not how did we become the most expensive electricity generator in the EU overnight but what fibs have been told all these years to make us believe that we were not? If only I had the time, the money and the energy to collect every one of the criminal utterances of energy ministers over the years claiming that all sources of renewable energy were too expensive, impractical and unfeasible. Anyone for a thesis in politics and engineering?
While other countries are secretive about their military hardware and strategies, Malta has been secretive about oil. Where ours came from and how much we paid for it was a state secret for decades. Whether or not we stand in the only oil free patch of the Mediterranean between Libya and Italy has been a taboo since colonial times.
We have been treated like children as though we had no right to know, no right to ask… because someone somewhere older and wiser has had the matter in hand in our best interests.
Or has he/she/it? As with everything else from property prices to pensions, health and social assistance the priority has been to make everybody happy, to give people what they think they want and now. The overriding criterion has been electoral success. Transparency, proper accounting of public funds, the framing and publication of a rational, long term strategy has always been beyond us.
Have you ever been obliged to leave off your work on the computer because of a power cut only to try to turn on the TV to find out what’s happening? Our frustration and anger about our electricity bills should be permanently mingled with that strain of sheepish embarrassment. Our lack of curiosity about the fundamentals of energy generation should make us feel as stupid now as when we click on the kettle in a blackout. That was the one thing we should have known in the tiniest detail. Everything else stands or falls by it: our family budget as well as our most elaborate business plans. Not only did we have the right to know, we had a duty to find out if we wanted to take ourselves seriously.
The reddest of red faces should shine off the heads of civil society leaders presently complaining about the energy ambush. It should have been impossible for them to be taken unawares as they have. They should have made it impossible. This was too fundamental to allow to chance and electoral expedience. Even as they demand the heads of the political and technocratic leadership that has put them in this tight spot, they should tender their own resignations in order to give an example. Where have they and their organizations been all these years? Leaving it to a small specialised group of environmentalists to point out the obvious?
If we had anything vaguely rational in our national energy policy, Malta should be a world leader in renewable energy use. It should have been a world famous energy lab for every corporation in the field. Long before Smart City was proposed as a bid for the leading edge in IT, Malta should have made a name for itself as the microstate providing a microcosm of the future in energy generation, energy use and storage. We have always had the greatest need, what should have been the most potent driving force for innovation and enterprise. Where is it all? Why has there been no sign of it? Who will answer for its absence?
Fluctuations in the price of oil do not completely explain the sudden change. That wild ride has brought us sooner to the inevitable conclusion. It appears that we are no longer able to manipulate costs and revenues as we once did. It appears that we can no longer delay extensions to the power station. Telling ourselves that renewable energy is not for us has suddenly gone out of fashion.
Jumping out of the bushes with a massive energy bill is not the way to manage the energy sector nor any part of the economy which depends on it. Commitments have already been made for the year ahead which cannot be easily revised. If a hike was inevitable, if future hikes are easy to predict, it still makes no sense to pass them all on to consumers in one great wallop.
While we sit and ponder why the Government has felt constrained to act in this way in mid recession we should not lose sight of the obvious. We still need transparency. We will always need it. We need to know and to be able to predict costs for a year or two ahead. We need to find the way to make that possible. We need to take elections and electoral circuses out of the energy equation. We need to learn this lesson and never forget it.
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