“The situation is unacceptable,” Miriam Dalli said. She continued: “I understand the frustration of people experiencing power cuts at this time, during a heatwave.”
Malta’s energy minister was speaking after swathes of the country were left without electricity for hours on end in the height of summer.
Dalli did not utter those words last week, though. That quote is from August 2021. And here we are, two years later, in the exact same situation.
Even the explanations given are the same. It was the heat, Enemalta told us in 2021, then last year and again last week.
Maltese summers are always hot. And climate change forecasts suggest they are going to get hotter. Unlike its counterparts in mainland Europe, Enemalta cannot say it was caught off-guard by the heat.
Nor can it say it was caught off-guard by growing demand for electricity.
Enemalta has told us demand will surge in the coming years, and Malta’s population explosion is common knowledge.
In other words, there is every reason to believe that Enemalta – and the government – could have predicted these power cuts. If so, why did it not warn people beforehand? And why was it unable to ramp up its customer service effort in time?
Instead, people were left quite literally in the dark. Parents were forced to sit in running cars in the dead of night, to get babies to sleep; businesses were forced to close, and in some cases, dump defrosted products.
These power cuts also tell a hard truth about the government’s energy decisions.
There is every reason to believe that Enemalta – and the government – could have predicted these power cuts
Reducing tariffs in 2014 helped kickstart the economy, but a decade on, the government still seems to live in the shadow of that achievement, terrified of raising tariffs, even if only for heavy users.
We are spending hundreds of millions of euros a year to cushion energy prices, when that money is desperately needed to upgrade our electricity distribution systems. That is not to say that subsidies should be scrapped. But do they really need to apply across the board, even to those using energy to power swimming pools, sports cars or other luxuries?
According to Enemalta, electricity demand is still 25 per cent below the maximum amount of energy that can be supplied. That means electricity distribution is the bottleneck.
The government’s spending priorities don’t seem to reflect that, though. It has pledged to build a second interconnector by 2025 at a cost of €170 million, but only allocated €90 million to spend on improving the distribution network through to 2028 – less than the €130 million Enemalta said it had spent on the network in the previous seven years.
This government has built its economic model on boosting Malta’s population, and Dalli herself is politically responsible for the nationwide shift to electric vehicles. Both those things are extremely energy intensive. Both sound laughable, when seen from the perspective of a country that cannot even manage to deliver existing demand. Our infrastructure is unable to cope with Malta as it is, let alone Malta as it will be.
If policymakers want to turn Malta into a metropolis in the Med then perhaps they should first sit down and work out how exactly they intend to power this ever-expanding Lilliput.
In 2021, Dalli made Enemalta’s then-CEO, Jason Vella, carry the can for the power cuts. One day after Dalli sternly said the situation was “unacceptable”, Vella was brought out to apologise to the nation. Three months later, he was out of that job.
Who will Dalli blame now, if not herself and the energy ministers who preceded her?