Malta is generating enough energy to meet peak season demands, Enemalta has said, as the country inches towards another likely hot summer.
Asked when it plans to have Delimara’s temporary emergency power plant up and running to possibly avoid a repeat of last July’s power cuts, an Enemalta spokesperson said the company was still evaluating bids submitted for the €46 million project. But Enemalta insisted that last summer’s power cuts were unrelated to electricity generation.
“Enemalta has sufficient generation capacity at its disposal to meet the seasonal peak demand, even in the case of an extreme heatwave. The lease of the emergency generation plant is extraneous to the distribution network reinforcements that are presently being carried out by Enemalta.”
The 60-megawatt emergency plant would be required to take over part of the country’s electricity generation in case of an “unplanned outage” in any major power plants during a high peak demand.
First announced during the budget, the emergency diesel plant is to be installed in Delimara and will be temporarily leased for two years until Malta gets its second interconnector to Sicily up and running.
The dire need of multiple sources of energy and a reliable cable network became starkly evident in July, when Malta endured 10 hellish days of power cuts spread across the islands amid record heatwaves.
The government announced the emergency plant as one of the mitigating measures and had initially said it would be allocating €12 million for it, but according to the tender results has shot to €46 million.published last month its cost
It is understood one local and three international companies bid for the contract and the tender specified the winning bid was to have the plant up and running in no longer than 13 weeks.
Times of Malta asked Enemalta whether it would be able to have the plant up and running by summer, since 13 weeks from next week would be the beginning of July.
It said the evaluation process is still ongoing and “the tender evaluation committee has the requisite competence and experience to carry out the adjudication of the offers submitted, in full compliance with the applicable procurement regulations”.
It did not say whether it has a back-up plan in case the plant is not completed by the time it might be needed in the peak summer months. But sources told Times of Malta that temporary plants like this one can be assembled and installed relatively quickly, and an experienced company could manage to set it up and have it ready to go in 10 weeks, or even less.
According to Enemalta chairperson Ryan Fava, energy demand increased by 14 per cent last July compared to previous summers, and it is anticipated that the demand this coming summer will rise higher.