Wind-powered snakes and ladders

The way government policy about wind energy has evolved over the past years and months reminds me of a wind powered game of Snakes & Ladders. As long drawn out as a Brazilian soap opera, as convoluted as an Ingmar Bergman movie and as incomprehensible as Kafka might prove to be for the uninitiated.

One moment we were led to believe that it had to be a deep water farm or nothing, designed to project us as the field leaders in the whole Mediterranean.

The next we turned down landbased wind farms out of fear of their visual impact without having carried out the social perception surveys originally recommended by Mott Macdonald. In the draft renewable energy policy report for Malta of 2006 the government even said that other constraints would impact on the Maltese townscape, good neighbourhood and planning policies (page 12) without once again bothering to check whether this was true or not.

When one fine day the Prime Minister came out exclaiming, yes, we have decided ... it will be is-Sikka l-Bajda, subject to the standard studies, it all reminded me of an earlier outburst of his when in Eureka-like fashion he had pronounced himself in favour of ix-Xagħra il-Ħamra only to end up eating humble pie a few months later to save his "green credentials" by way of an inevitable U-turn.

If initial studies already showed that is-Sikka l-Bajda would actually create many problems, why was there initial resistance to consider other options? A perhaps even more pertinent question might be: Why did the government go for an evaluation of concerns from government stakeholders on an offshore wind farm at is-Sikka l-Bajda when it was evident all along that this was the government's preferred option as last week's press conference went on to prove? If the executive summary of the report was drawn up in July 2008, why was the document by the Committee on Wind Energy (COWE) actually signed four months later - in November? What went on in between?

We then had a draft report on renewable energy possibly by MRA that rules out is-Sikka l-Bajda because "current analysis indicated that disadvantages of this mode of RES exploitation may outweigh its advantages".

The government's failure to specifically identify a Gozo site as one of the preferred options flies in the face of all the hullabaloo about turning Gozo into an eco island.

I am aware that the government has in hand studies about the Gozo North Shore eastward from Ras il-Qbajjar towards Ras il-Qala stopping at Mistra Rocks just south of Wied San Blas which has an exposure to prevailing wind that not only varies from excellent to very good but which is distinctly better than is-Sikka l-Bajda. This apart, this site does not pose the same ornithological issues and related bird problems that is-Sikka l-Bajda poses, as may be confirmed by formal submissions already presented to the authorities by BirdLife. I have recently come to learn that a small number of turbines there can actually give the same output as that expected from is-Sikka l-Bajda!

Sikka was chosen as a consequence of the failure of the government's originally misguided policies on deep water farms. It was a knee jerk reaction to the accusation that we risked having nothing to show in the near to medium term. Let us be frank, as the new cliché goes. The group put together by Minister George Pullicino was not chosen to identify the merits of Sikka but rather to find ways round the objections raised by practically every government entity in response to questionnaires on close offshore sites sent out by MRA in 2005-2006.

All these symptoms tend to point in one direction: that piecemeal plans were, are and are predestined to remain the order of the day of a government in political free fall.

Talking of déjà-vu, we are back to 2008 with the government announcing one project after another in the run-up to the elections. This time round - the euro elections, a belated energy policy, a wind farm policy without a specific document on renewables except for references in the former document. And, imminently, the Mepa project, although we still have to figure out whether it will be truly comprehensive and holistic or merely cosmetic.

Meanwhile, it remains a mystery why the offer by a private company to build a large-scale wind farm at Marfa ridge in 2004 was ignored and allowed to turn into a missed opportunity.

Perhaps the next consultant we might need to turn to could be Hercule Poirot!