How green is Smart City?

By Maltese standards, Smart City is a fantastic development. It makes use of a derelict site to create an environment that will be attractive to investors looking to set up shop here.

Its scale is such that it will affect our quality of life in years to come, whether we like it or not. Therefore it is important that it is planned properly and sustainably.

This country can ill afford to build an unsustainable project of this magnitude. Hence, it is imperative that it goes through all the necessary checks and balances to make sure that any risk or negative impact arising from the development be adequately assessed and mitigated.

An Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) was recently posted on the Malta Environment and Planning Authority website for public comment. This 773-page (not including appendices) document attempts to assess the positive and negative impact of the proposed development.

My main concerns relate to the use of energy (namely electricity). It was to be expected that a development as large as Smart City would have an impact on the country's infrastructural services. However, what was not expected was the fact that this impact would be so huge, such that it will affect the sustainability of the country as a whole.

According to the EIS, Smart City will consume 110,000 MWh of electricity a year. This is equivalent to the electricity consumption of 30,000 Maltese households - more than what the combined population of Birkirkara, Qormi and Sliema consumes today. Smart City will only have a resident population of 936 (and 866 guests in the hotel).

How could a state-of-the-art development that has been heralded as being a model of sustainable development be so inefficient in the use of the expensive and scarce commodity that is electricity in Malta?

The EIS says Smart City will rely on Enemalta's capability to provide electricity as and when required. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. Firstly, the efficiency with which Enemalta generates and distributes its power leaves much to be desired. Malta's electricity is generated at two oil-fired inefficient power stations and comes at huge national cost. The surcharge for large consumers like Smart City is capped which essentially means that Enemalta (read as the taxpayer) will be subsidising the supply of electricity. How smart is that?

Secondly, apart from the cost issue, one would have expected the developers and their consultants (as well as Mepa and Malta Resources Authority as the competent authorities) to assess Enemalta's ability to actually generate and deliver the electricity to Smart City before actually rushing ahead with the development.

Anybody familiar with energy issues in this country will immediately tell you that there is simply not enough electricity-generating capacity at Enemalta's power stations to cater for the short-term needs of the country, let alone when it will be lumped with the huge additional load that is Smart City.

And yet, the developers stated that "it is pertinent to keep constantly in mind that sufficient and redundant uninterruptible power supply is a fundamental requirement for the attraction of ICT and media business to Malta" and assumes that the "national infrastructure would not be failing the project" (The Times, September 5). What happens if Enemalta fails to come up this huge amount of power, which is indeed very likely?

However, there exist alternatives - which have inexplicably been overlooked by the project's consultants. Guidance is provided by the EU Commission and its Directives.

Indeed, Article 5 of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (2002/91/EC) requests that all new buildings having a useful floor area of over 1,000 m2 (Smart City will have 326,000 m2 of mixed office, commercial, residential and retail areas) have to carry out technical, environmental and economic feasibility studies on alternative systems such as decentralised energy supply systems based on renewable energy, district heating/cooling and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems.

The latter involves the use of a high-efficiency (diesel) generator or a small power station to simultaneously generate both electricity and useful heat in-house. The waste heat from the generator can be used for central heating and also to drive chillers to produce energy-free air-conditioning, making Smart City self-sufficient in its energy and heating/cooling requirements while also alleviating Enemalta of this substantial load.

CHP combined with absorption cooling would have boosted the total energy efficiency of Smart City to around 80 per cent, a far cry from the less than 25 per cent efficiency of electricity delivered by Enemalta. If this idea is taken on board, the electricity demand of Smart City from the electricity grid can be reduced to nil.

And yet, the EIA completely ignores these opportunities and legal obligations and simply informs us that Smart City will gobble up 110,000 MWh of electricity from Enemalta's distribution system, even though "it is clear that the existing network is not sufficient and a new electricity network is necessary for the supply of the forecasted load of Smart City".

We do not have the luxury to ignore EU Directives. If the developers (and Mepa) persist in pushing ahead in clear disregard of the directive, Malta is in line for some hefty fines.

In its defence, Smart City has said that it is developing the project in line with the international LEED (Leadership in Energy Efficiency Development) standards. However, it failed to highlight that this is a voluntary standard, not a mandatory one.

As a citizen of this country and of the EU, I am much more comfortable with Smart City adhering to the (minimum) standards set by the EU (and transposed into Maltese legislation) than some voluntary standard developed in the US. In any case, if this LEED standard is such a stringent standard as Smart City would have us believe, what difficulty does it have to meet the minimum Maltese and EU standards?