Transparent energy sources

In 2008, the segment of electricity generation attributable to renewables in Malta is so small that it defies reliable calculation. The reasons for this are many. None of them do credit to those who have governed the country for the past several decades. Boiling it down to one key factor, the issue can be reduced to the price at which Enemalta offers to buy electricity.

Net metering, introduced only recently, allows consumers turned producers through the purchase of an alternative energy system to sell the electricity they produce at the rate at which they buy electricity. As long as electricity is subsidised in one way or another and the only sale option is through net metering it remains uneconomical to invest in renewable generation systems. Enemalta makes a killing by buying electricity cheaper than it can produce it while shifting capital costs to consumers and now to the government.

When our energy regulator is finally aroused from its deep coma and insists that Enemalta buys electricity at its own production costs everything changes. To date, Enemalta's production costs remain officially a state secret. In a groundbreaking thrust, The Sunday Times last week published estimates by three independent analysts giving the much sought after figure as 18c kw/h. It is the best available data given that our public energy monopoly has not published its audited accounts since 2005. Ironically, this was the year in which the average cost of renewables in Spain coincided with other sources of energy at 9c per kw/h.

This is the major spanner kept religiously in the works that has prevented an alternative energy boom in Malta. My heart went out to Volker Schwan who wrote in to The Times on November 17 in a fit of exasperation at the non-response by everybody in authority to his efforts to propose yet another valid renewable energy system. His was only the last in a very long series of baffling defeats. Malta is a cemetery of such excellent ideas.

When we ultimately find out the reasons why, there would be grounds to expect a first Maltese tangentopoli had it not been for the unaccountability of everybody in a two-party system. Right now the situation is far too critical to worry too much about reasons why or to attribute blame for our absurd past.

The one hope for the future, thanks to Minister Austin Gatt's choice of tactics in recent weeks, is a possible collapse of the sultanate, at least with regard to energy production. The response generated from the social partners and from the opposition has been a demand for transparency. We all insist on our right to know the facts, for everybody to have access to the facts in a reliable manner, permanently and, as far as possible, up to the minute. Once it is achieved, our future changes for good. No future government will be able to mess around as all past government have done.

Only when that fundamental gain is achieved can we hope for a serious development of the renewable energy sector in Malta. We are not yet at the beginning of the beginning.

The budget measures favouring investment in renewables are a pre-infancy, perhaps not even a pregnancy. A limited subsidy on capital costs is an important break with a long tradition that actively discouraged any such initiative through blatantly deceitful statements by government ministers expressing contempt for renewables. We should be thankful. However, what will make the difference is a fair return on investment through the sale of electricity and a liberalisation of the market allowing private energy generators large and small to decide for themselves which options to make. In my dreams I can envisage our economy thrust forward through renewable energy generation from every rooftop, from PV panels shading traffic on every road artery, from every available source of biogas, from wave energy, from sea currents and from the wind. I can see hundreds if not thousands of people employed in a satisfying manner in technical and managerial tasks associated with the sector. Let the boom begin.

We will see none of this as long as the government continues to act as a dog-in-the-manger, allowing to escape its clutches only that which it is forced to release under the greatest possible pressure, protecting the status quo of its energy monopoly and aiming exclusively for mega-million euro projects in which it acts as intermediary with a handful of business counterparts.

The mental shift that has to be made, as far as renewables are concerned, is that the government need not provide all the answers.

The government must get out of the way. In a two-party-one-party-government system this is an enormous leap to make. It entails the end of the sultanate as a mental prison for both sultan and subjects. It seems almost impossible. It could be done simply by having a thought. We live in hope.

Dr Vassallo is a committee member of the European Green Party.

www.harryvassallo.blogspot.com