Enemalta was 'not expecting' record power demand and heatwave

Enemalta was taken by surprise by the “alarming” demand on the grid and record high temperatures, Enemalta chair Ryan Fava said on Wednesday afternoon.

Fava was speaking to journalists on the third day of widespread power outages across the Maltese islands.

Valletta bore the brunt of the blackouts on Wednesday, with court proceedings, including the trial of Yorgen Fenech grinding to a halt as the power went out.

Fava said Enemalta had addressed several of the major faults that had impacted power supply across several towns, from Birkirkara to Fgura, Luqa and Gudja, in previous days.

However, a cable fault in the Valletta area had developed overnight, blocking the city’s main power supply.

Excavation work will be carried out over the coming hours to replace the faulty cable, Fava said.

Valletta presents a particularly tricky situation, he added, since heritage and geographical constraints make it difficult to operate emergency generators to temporarily provide an alternative power supply.

Nevertheless, he said, the broader situation was “under control”.

Enemalta chair Ryan Fava in 2024. File photo

St Julian’s substation caught fire on Tuesday

Fava also rebuffed reports of fires at several substations across the island, saying that out of the 1,600 substations operated by the authority, a single substation in St Julian’s had caught fire in the early hours of Tuesday morning.

He insisted that this year’s outages are not a repeat of the widespread power cuts that hit the island in the summer of 2023, despite “the nature of the damages being similar”.

For a start, Fava said, the areas most heavily impacted are those where cable upgrades as part of a multi-million Euro plan to upgrade Malta’s distribution network have yet to be carried out.

“Where we invested is showing good results,” Fava said. “That doesn’t mean that newly-installed cables cannot develop faults, but signs are promising”.

Record demand came as a surprise

Nevertheless, Fava admitted that the authority had not been expecting the demand on the grid to grow quite so rapidly as temperatures surged.

On Wednesday, Malta’s thermometers registered a temperature of more than 42°C for the third consecutive day, setting a new record.

“I was not expecting the extent of the demand and the temperature,” Fava said when asked whether the authority had been caught flat-footed by the situation.

“Last year we did not have the temperature and demand on the grid that we are seeing this year,” he said, pointing to how Malta’s grid registered a record demand of 741 megawatts on Tuesday.

By comparison, the peak during the 2023 power cuts was 663 megawatts he said, meaning that demand had increased by almost 80 megawatts since then.

“We are seeing areas where the load is increasing at an alarming rate,” he said, pointing to Sliema as one example.

Outage map ‘only shows high tension outages’

While Valletta’s outage may be Enemalta’s primary headache at the moment, residents across several other localities remain without power, with some taking increasingly drastic steps to escape the heat.

Nevertheless, many of these outages do not appear on Enemalta’s live outage map, which currently only displays blackouts in the Valletta area.

This is because the map only displays “high-tension outages,” Fava said, describing them as outages at the source of an area’s power supply which affect entire neighbourhoods.

Other outages being experienced in other localities at the moment are individual “low-tension outages” which affect individual homes or a relatively small cluster of properties.

On Wednesday afternoon, the energy ministry said those experiencing outages of six hours or longer would be compensated for their losses.