Enemalta to retain generating capacity, besides undersea cables

Enemalta does not intend to replace its local generating capacity with a single cable, the corporation said this evening.

Replying to a statement issued in the morning by the Enemalta Professional Officers' Union criticising the proposed cable connecting Malta and Sicily, Enemalta said it was surprised that the EPOU had chosen to publically express its disagreement with the corporation’s proposal without having first discussed its concerns within the corporation.

Enemalta said it was undeniable that the failure of a 200MW source of electricity would result in the outage of electricity supply to large parts of Malta.

In fact, this scenario was similar to what happened when the aging power station at Marsa developed a major fault which resulted in all units tripping.

However, modern load shedding systems have been implemented at both power stations to ensure that in such cases only the load required to be switched off in order to maintain the proper balance between supply and demand was actually switched off.

The corporation said that modern submarine cables, which were installed with adequate protection, had proven to be extremely reliable, and were generally credited with actually improving the security of supply of the interconnected systems, apart from the other benefits resulting from shared generating resources, economies of scale in generation, and the availability of electricity sourced from generating units with lower emissions and lower average costs.

However, the Corporation did not intend to replace its local generating capacity with a single cable.

“The Maltese public may rest assured, that the corporation will retain sufficient reserve plant to either substitute or replace the use of a faulty cable whenever necessary.

“Furthermore the corporation is considering the installation of more than one cable interconnector in order that the load be shared between them, in exactly the same manner that it currently has a greater generation capacity than is required to meet the local demand, which provides reserve capacity in case of fault.”

Enemalta said that both wind and PV were classified as ‘intermittent’ sources of energy as they were not available all the time implying that Enemalta and conventional generating plant had to be available as a back-up.

“It is true that PV is better suited to contribute to meet part of the local demand, as such installations produce electricity during the day and hence generally speaking tend to reduce the peak demand and in fact it has been noted that the Climate Change Committee has not specifically recommended any particular renewable technology, as all have their benefits and the optimum solution will be a mix.

“However, given the current costs of such PV panels, the cost of electricity generated by such systems is much higher than that generated by conventional systems, which in itself is more expensive than that available in Italy and the rest of Europe, and which would be available for import through a cable once this is installed.

“It is very easy for the EPOU to advocate that the installation of such PV systems should be incentivised, but this in reality means higher tariffs for all consumers,” Enemalta warned.

(See also: http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090304/local/enemalta-engineers-union-against-power-link-to-sicily)