'Cautious' Gatt awaits report

The Investments Minister was yesterday unperturbed by the Prime Minister's apparently contrasting view of what might have caused last week's major power cut.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said he was surprised by the "series of coincidences" that surrounded the disruption in electricity supply. His suspicions were in contrast to Austin Gatt's parliamentary statement in which he effectively ruled out foul play.

Talking to The Times yesterday Dr Gatt said: "Maybe I was a bit more cautious. However, the Prime Minister could do it since at this stage the fault could be purely technical or sabotage. It is the technical investigation that will tell us what happened."

That investigation, being carried out by Enemalta, is expected to be concluded on Friday.

Last Tuesday, two lengthy power cuts hit both islands. The first occurred at 10.30 a.m. and the second at 4 p.m. Enemalta engineers later established the location of the fault to be one of the turbines at Marsa.

The loss of generation capacity had a cascading effect on the remaining generation capacity at both power stations.

The electricity was out for almost a day, with economist and newly-elected Labour MEP Edward Scicluna estimating the cost to the economy to have been between €8 million and €10 million.

Meanwhile, the corporation yesterday said the power cut was not linked in any way to a lack of spare capacity as implied by various media reports.

Although Enemalta's Generation Plan report of 2006 had identified the lack of spare generating capacity as a weak spot that might have serious consequences as from this summer, the corporation said the lower growth in demand meant the current reserve margin was still greater than 60MW at the anticipated peak load of about 430MW.

Enemalta said it had sufficient reserve capacity to meet the summer demand.

At the time of the blackout the corporation had a number of turbines undergoing maintenance.

ksansone@timesofmalta.com