Finance Minister Tonio Fenech said today that Enemalta had enough generating capacity to meet peak summer demand.

He also said that the ad hoc committee which he has asked Enemalta to set up in the wake of the Good Friday power cut would, among other issues, assess what additional measures needed to be taken so that faults in either of the power stations did not result in a total shutdown of both stations.

Mr Fenech, who was replying to questions by Brian Hansford on One TV, said that the committee - which is to report by the end of the month - could bring in foreign engineers to make their own recommendations, because an outside view was often useful.

He said that while investment had been made to stop the domino effect of a fault in one power station onto the other, there were still circumstances where this could happen, and these needed to be reduced as much as possible.

Mr Fenech insisted that the Good Friday outage had nothing to do with generation capacity, more so since last Friday was actually a low demand day. However investigations were ongoing into why demand in the span of 10 minutes spiked to double the immediately available reserve capacity of 5MW. The power cut, he said, was not caused by a technical fault but the fact that the spike meant that the turbine which was on stand by could not automatically synchronise with the other turbines. Engineers tried to do so manually and one could perhaps discuss what other measures they could have taken, such as temporarily shutting off some feeders, as was attempted, albeit too late, at Marsa.

The minister insisted that Malta had the necessary generation capacity to meet the peak demand expected in the summer, but generation capacity would have to rise by summer of next year to keep up, hence the investment being made on the Delimara power station extension and plans for the interconnector with the power grid in Italy.