As a former Enemalta engineer, I was often blamed for power cuts, when in truth I should have been commended for contributing to the restoration of the supply. But perhaps this is as old as public electricity supply itself.

In 1965, George Borg Olivier, Prime Minister of the newly independent Malta, flicked on a ceremonial switch which inaugurated the first turbine at the new Marsa power station, and this was followed by Archbishop Michael Gonzi blessing the turbine. Hardly had the holy water dried when the turbine suddenly tripped. The Italian engineer responsible for the installation of the turbine promptly blamed the Archbishop's blessing and sought to exorcise the unit by a burst of blasphemy in his language.

Move on to 1972. A dynamic and aggressive Labour Party was then in power and the Nationalists were at their lowest ebb. In order to revive the spirit it was decided to hold an indoor rally at a theatre at Sliema. Soon after the rally started there was a power failure and the rally had to be abandoned. Ċensu Tabone, the PN secretary general, blamed the government for sabotaging the electricity supply in order to disrupt the rally. No amount of explanations by the then Malta Electricity Board convinced the PN supporters that this was not the case.

In the paranoid Mintoff era of the 1970s and 1980s conspiracy theories were four a penny and magisterial inquests were the rule of the day, so much so that someone coined the euphemism "kissing the crucifix" for appearing before such an inquest. I recall once spending some six hours at the police headquarters waiting room until the CID inspector found time to grill me at the dead of night on the tripping of a transformer at the power station early in the day.

In the 1990s the new Delimara station had its fair share of teething troubles and the frequency of power cuts reached a peak. With the approaching winter the Enemalta chairman sought to put the public's mind at rest by arranging for me to be interviewed on television to state that the power station plant was fully prepared for winter and there was adequate generating capacity. The interview was duly broadcast but some five minutes later a high tension underground cable developed a fault and a sizable part of Malta was plunged in darkness. Naturally I went into hiding but this time I could not blame some unknown person for sabotaging the system to put me in a bad light.

Last June there was a major power cut and the whole of Malta was without electricity for several hours. This happened during a debate in Parliament on Enemalta. The Prime Minister angrily ordered an enquiry to investigate a possible sabotage but the trouble was traced to a faulty sensor on the gas turbine at Marsa that chose to fail at the wrong time. The outburst by corporation chairman Alex Tranter that last week's outage, on the day after he was interviewed on Dissett, could possibly be caused by sabotage, equally reflected his annoyance, though as an engineer he should know better.

Electricity power cuts cause universal disruption but fortunately malicious intent has never been the cause of any major fault.

The good news is that, with the new plant planned for Delimara, each generating unit will have a capacity of only 17 Megawatts compared to the 60 Megawatts of the other Delimara turbines. This means that it will be less likely that the loss of a single unit will cause such a disturbance that the whole system would go down. And it will be restarted in a few minutes unlike the steam turbines which may take over an hour to restart. It was a wise decision to choose this plant.