We must not become energy poor

The recent alarming news regarding the price of energy has shocked everybody and it is easy to blame others. However, this is a global problem affecting even the richest nations on earth.

There are many African countries and some small states in Asia which have become energy poor. In fact Zimbabwe was the latest country on earth to experience meltdown due to energy scarcity as well as bad political management and other small countries have had to hand over gold as payment for energy.

There is no doubting that the world is in trouble with regards to energy, even the few remaining countries on earth that have a natural bounty of gas, oil, tar sands and coal realise that at current rates of consumption, their reserves won't last more than a couple of decades and as far as exportation of those finite products goes, well maybe not even a decade.

We all know that covering Comino with solar panels would barely produce a fraction of our energy, but providing every household with solar panels for water heating and electrical generation with a means of using what you need and giving what is left back to the grid for storage or further use is not new technology, but old technology.

A good start would be a meeting between private enterprise (Germany has the best technology in Europe regarding renewables) the government, local banks and electrical power monopolies to hammer out a way of providing cheap finance through a pay-as-you-go scheme for solar household investment as well as invertors and electrical storage capacity. This is not impossible and can be done!

This would alleviate massive demand for imported fossil fuels, reducing the money we would have to come up with for imports.

Secondly, I would be interested to know why wind-generated power has been ruled out in Malta, since it would seem that wind is the only long-term solution to be able to generate enough power to run our energy-intensive water system.

Gas pipelines to other countries are futile short-term fixes that require huge amounts of investment and raw materials only to land us back at square one again a few years later. The whole world is now chasing LNG imports and building LNG terminals. So how long until LNG becomes as expensive and scarce as oil?

A coherent policy is needed on all these important issues. We cannot afford to wait for bombshells to be dropped on us and we cannot afford to become energy poor with such large financial problems hanging over us.

Many of us are lucky: we will not be alive in 2050 to have to endure living in a post-carbon fuel world with limited food availability and extremely limited power availability; we won't have to struggle to feed ourselves without fertilisers and struggle to find fresh clean water to drink; we won't have to worry about ways to keep warm in winter and how to cook food without energy; we won't have to deal with the general breakdown in society one could expect from such a scenario.

Our children will.