Editorial

The reason given by Enemalta for the recent power failure can well be described as baffling. And that is putting it very, very mildly. Had parliament been in session, neither side of the House would probably have been satisfied with the explanation given by the corporation, not because it was given two days after the failure - something which in itself is quite unacceptable in this day and age - but because the reason it gave raised other questions.

Malta and Gozo were without power for four hours on Wednesday, July 24. A failure of this duration is not a light matter, for it costs the country a great deal in terms of loss of work, apart from the great inconvenience it creates to all.

Two days after the failure, the corporation attributed the cause to a transformer at the Marsa station which, it said, had tripped due to high temperatures, setting off a chain of events that led to a shutdown of both power stations.

The corporation said the combined effect of the internal load of the power station due to the high electricity demand and the high ambient temperature caused the temperature of station transformer five to rise. Because of this, the transformer tripped.

The load of the auxiliary equipment was then automatically transferred to transformer six, which overloaded and tripped.

As if to set the consumers' minds at rest, the corporation said the termperature alarms of the auxiliary transformers had been reset so that in case of a temperature increase, the alarms would be triggered earlier, giving the corporation personnel enough time to switch on additional genertating plants to relieve the auxiliary transformers.

But why did the corporation not think of this before? Surely this is not a case of the corporation not knowing what the temperature, or the demand, for that matter, is going to be like at the peak of summer.

Enemalta's annual report for last year explained that "the steady rise in demand in summer had continued, reaching 348 megawatts. This had exceeded even the winter peak. Ironically, this peak demand was registered on July 17, 2001. At the time of the breakdown last month, on July 24, the total load stood at 347 MW!

Millions of liri, taxpayers' money, have been invested in the building of a new power generation plant. The country was told that the Delimara station would solve all of our energy problems. Indeed, there was time when we thought Delimara would be able to meet all the demand on its own - at least that was the impression given at first.

Of course, this is not to say that the corporation has been idle all the time. Far from it. Great progress has been made both in power generation capacity and in distribution and more work is in the pipeline to ensure that the corporation will continue to meet the rising demand.

But concurrently with this on-going work, greater care and attention would need to be given to those areas of its operations likely to cause, through blackouts, inconvenience and additional costs. Also important for the corporation is to establish a more efficient public relations system, one that works well all the time, particularly when consumers are hit by power failures.