The frequent power cuts of the past days have already cost the country some €200 million, the Nationalist Party said on Wednesday.
PN finance spokesperson Jerome Caruana Cilia said the figure was calculated with the party’s economy spokesperson Ivan Bartolo and a team of experts using publicly available data and information gathered from the public.
“Small and medium-sized businesses were heavily impacted in the last days in a situation without precedent,” Caruana Cilia said at a press conference.
“Imagine someone who employs eight or nine people who had to send them home more than once in the last days”.
Cilia said the PN used the same formula in its workings as that employed by the Labour Party 14 years ago when the then-opposition had conducted a similar exercise following a power cut.
In June 2009, then PL MEP and economist Edward Scicluna said a power cut that lasted for several hours cost between €8m and €10 million.
“If we exclude the losses to households and estimate only marketable goods and services, we estimate that the economic loss caused by non-activity resulting from the outage ranges from €8m to €10 million, which is about half our national daily value-added," Scicluna had said in 2009.
Using the same workings, the PN exercise found that the power cuts over the past 10 days cost the country’s economy €200 million, Caruana Cilia said.
The country’s energy provider, Enemalta, has been grappling with power cuts for 11 days and 10 consecutive nights as the country’s distribution network failed in many localities.
Enemalta blamed heatwave temperatures that consistently went over 40 degrees Celsius for the faults saying the heat, not extreme demand for electricity, was causing faults on its high-voltage cables.
But cuts persisted on Wednesday and Thursday even as temperatures dropped.
On Tuesday, Enemalta CEO Jonathan Cardona told a media briefing that the lower temperatures might ease the electricity demand. However, the power grid needs to stabilise.
On Thursday, Caruana Cilia said that people affected by the cuts should be compensated, and the necessary investment needed to be made so that the situation did not repeat itself.
Malta's tourism reputation affected
PN tourism spokesperson Mario De Marco echoed the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association's concerns that Malta suffered a reputational blow as tourists were impacted by the power cuts.
“Stakeholders of the tourism industry were looking at summer 2023 as the first season of normality after summers that were affected by COVID-19. This should have been a peak tourism season but it was hit by the government’s shortcomings,” De Marco said.
He said tourists were cancelling bookings and checking out of their hotels early.
Power cuts also affected Malta's long-term reputation, with many frustrated tourists writing negative reviews on the internet, he said.
“Negative online comments can be seen by thousands and remain there forever,” he said.
PN energy spokesperson Mark Anthony Sammut called on the government to recognise its shortcomings.
"Prime Minister Robert Abela is cut off from reality and is trying to shift the blame," he said.
As the country's population increased, the government did not invest in the infrastructure to reflect the increased demand on the country's services, he said.