Manufacturing companies at the Bulebel industrial estate in Żejtun were left without power for much of Thursday, with one business owner estimating the outage had cost their company around €5,000.

Businesses told Times of Malta they had been left without power from around 7.30am, with electricity only returning at around 1.30pm after Enemalta transported mobile generators to the area.

Not all businesses were reconnected, however, with one manufacturer saying they were still without power by 5.30pm.

The outage is just the latest in a series of such failures, with power cuts sweeping localities across the country and two major outages affecting Gozo and Mellieħa last month.

Deco Manufacturing sales manager Steve Mifsud described the outage as “a mess” and that the company had been forced to send its workforce home.

While power had returned in the afternoon, not all the company’s workers had managed to return to the site, he said, stressing the outage placed a strain on the business.

“At the moment we’re full and have a shutdown coming next week. We already had a software issue with one of our machines, so we were already on the edge. And this made things worse,” he said.

The outage was not showing on the Enemalta website at 4.30pm.

Meanwhile, the owner of a plastic molding company in the area who asked not to be named said their business had been without power all day and estimated the outage had cost them around €5,000.

The business owner said that despite numerous calls to Enemalta the company had not been provided with further information about the outage throughout the day.

They added that while the company had already applied to the government’s industrial land management company INDIS – which owns the land used by the business – for permission to install solar panels at the site, the application had still not been processed.

On Thursday evening, a spokesperson for Enemalta said the Bulebel industrial area had been left without power due to faults developing on two high-voltage cables. 

"We immediately made the necessary arrangements and repairs started immediately. Most factories were connected to alternative sources in a couple of hours," he said. 

He said that works were "underway" that evening and that factories would be reconnected to the grid "in the coming hours".

The spokesperson said the company had kept in constant communication with all impacted factories to prioritise the needs of each.

Power outages have become a regular occurrence across the country this summer, with Enemalta frequently blaming faults on high-voltage cables.

Such occurrences have renewed fears of a repeat of last summer when waves of power cuts amid a searing heatwave left residents across the country without light, air conditioning and adequate food storage capabilities for days.

In a report last month, the National Audit Office (NAO) said the power cuts last year took place against a backdrop of Enemalta's under-investment in the electricity grid.