Energy security lies in diversity (1)

Many years down Malta's never-ending, meandering road to a modern energy society, the Enemalta Professional Officers, Union suddenly decided to have a say in the matter. It declared disagreement with the government's aim of linking Malta to Sicily by submarine cable to tap electricity from the European grid and also expressed reservations about building a wind farm at sea. All this is done with seeming disregard to Malta's limited energy options.

It is generally accepted that energy diversity is the only way to maintain energy security and is the only way to maintain energy reliability, protection against price rises, terrorism or other threats to reliability of supply. The immediately available technologies open to Malta are limited to land-based and (near-) offshore, wind energy, solar energy (both as heat and conversion of light into electrical energy) and energy extraction from biomass. Together these have a considerable potential. These options must all be exploited with urgency; they are immediately possible in Malta and should provide a good energy mix on the principle of "balancing of power" to compensate for intermittency. There may possibly also be strong enough undersea currents which could be exploited.

Malta has plentiful sunshine and adequate wind speeds on exposed coastlines so both wind energy and, especially, photovoltaics offer a potential. These renewable energy options can be immediately exploited in Malta; they should have started to be exploited long ago. But we are still at Square One. As part of the diversity concept, Malta must also connect to the European grid. What the Enemalta professional officers are saying does not make sense in the face of modern fail-safe cable technology. The likelihood of catastrophic cable failure is far inferior to that of failure of oil supply resulting from Middle East political instability. Also, if (one cannot yet say "when") Malta eventually goes for large-scale renewable energy, then it is essential to connect to the grid because this will help to absorb the fluctuations in energy generation - and, in the unlikely event that Malta gets its act together, we could even occasionally have surplus energy (on windy sunny days) and send it to Europe.

The offer by a private company to build a large-scale (30MW) wind farm at Marfa ridge in 2004 was a missed opportunity. If this project had not been turned down it would by now have been into its fifth year of electricity generation and it would have given us a realistic estimate of the potential of wind energy in Malta, and whether such a land-based wind farm was aesthetically acceptable to the Maltese public. In the intervening five years Malta would have benefited in other ways. Besides providing a significant amount of clean electricity and reducing Malta's carbon dioxide emissions by a total of around 80,000 tons through reduction of fossil fuel combustion, such a project would also have provided a valuable opportunity for our technicians to gain some hands-on experience in the servicing and maintenance of wind energy generators and to test the logistics of adding a major source of intermittent electricity to our grid.

On the other hand the EPOU rightly recommends the introduction of better incentives on photovoltaic installations on household rooftops. The current incentive is not sufficiently attractive. Moreover, the painfully protracted bureaucratic application process and the limitation of the number of subsidy schemes is a deterrent. Those who have applied for the subsidy and who patiently queued up for hours outside the Enemalta office in Marsa to present their applications, early one cold rainy February morning, are still waiting for an answer. This means that the money which was put aside for the installation is lying uselessly in the bank and there is no indication how much longer the wait is to be. With such bungling, those motivated to install PV cells on their roofs and supplying clean energy to the grid cannot but be discouraged from doing so.

Other EPOU's recommendations aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions, such as car sharing schemes, projects to tackle vehicle emissions and promotion of bicycle use, are commendable. The report Towards a Low Carbon Society: The Nation's Health, Energy Security and Fossil Fuels recently published by The Today Public Policy Institute deals with all these (and more) in detail. This report is the result of much thinking, as befits a think-tank, and it provides a broad-based hands-on holistic approach to Malta's serious pollution and energy problem.

A digital copy of the TPPI report referred to above can be requested at gdmc@kemmunet.net.mt.