Energy and Health Minister Konrad Mizzi need not worry too much about delays in the power station project. BWSC, operated with heavy fuel oil (HFO), is not the ‘cancer factory’ Labour wants us to believe it is.
Much to the contrary, and as documented by Mepa experts themselves, BWSC is a clean technology with emissions well within international regulations. BWSC is a strategic asset the Chinese are most eager to buy.
Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s admission that his war horse has hit rough terrain shows how ill-advised and ill-prepared our man at the helm is. Just a few weeks ago he reassured everyone that he was in control.
As we have always advocated, liquefied natural gas (LNG) is an alternative fuel our country should aspire to, but only by acquiring it safely in gas form through a pipeline, and not storing it in liquid form in a 30-year-old vessel in Marsaxlokk Bay.
The Prime Minister was, and continues to be, evasive on this power station farce. We expect clear and definite answers to the many questions that come across from all walks of life, including MPs on his side of the fence.
Is the €30 million front money that should have been dished out to the public by the private contractor going to be lost? Who will be accountable for this? Who is going to be accountable for the inevitable delay penalties that the LNG operator will claim since it is said that a contract has already been signed?
Who is responsible for endangering peoples’ lives with the 140,000 cubic metres of liquefied gas stored in Marsaxlokk when the electricity bills are going to be reduced with the BWSC savings? The bad weather we experienced on October 6 caused one of the ships berthed at the Freeport to cut its moorings and drift away from the jetty. This is obviously never a good thing but, in this case, what happened is even more alarming. It confirms what many experts have been saying, namely that the gas storage tanker permanently moored in Marsaxlokk Bay in front of the Freeport poses a real danger.
Who is going to be liable for the surplus electricity produced by the BWSC plant and the interconnector given that we have committed to buy all the electricity that the LNG facility will produce irrespective of whether we need it?
Muscat and Mizzi have become the symbol of incompetence. They were unprepared and evidently gullible to the wishes of our local heavyweights in their frenzy to win power. The power station project has changed drastically from Labour’s electoral manifesto to the permit that Mepa issued in February. The 60,000 cubic metres of storage was more than doubled to make use of a 30-year-old vessel as a storage facility of LNG in Marsaxlokk Bay. Important risk assessments and procurement processes were curtailed to satisfy personal egos and unreasonable deadlines. Political cronies were enrolled by direct orders to offer consultancies they are inexperienced in.
The Prime Minister was and continues to be evasive on this power station farce
The surplus electricity that will be produced by Electrogas has cast all renewable energy initiatives that had started to take root in Malta, into a vacuum. The Energy Minister knows that by 2020 Malta needs to generate 10 per cent of its energy from renewables. Does this mean yet more electricity will go to waste or that we are destined to pay fines to the European Commission for non-compliance?
Malta is still without a national renewable energy action plan to explain all this despite the shallow rhetoric that this plan was supposed to have been published more than 12 months ago.
Mizzi went as far as negotiating the livelihood of the Enemalta employees in the least transparent manner to satisfy the needs of his Chinese counterparts. He ducks and sways to avoid all kinds of questions.
He finds himself on his knees rather than on track (as he always told us he was) to try to salvage the little remnants that remain.
He has isolated himself by ignoring all the views being voiced against his ‘grand project’ obsession because he was convinced about his power station plans way before he understood what the people around him and the experts had to say.
The casual walkabout last Thursday goes to show that we are miles away from what we were promised in January of 2013.
The power station plans are not delayed; they are stalled. This is a Labour project with a self-imposed deadline with clear and unequivocal consequences if it is missed.
This project surely cannot become yet another unfulfilled commitment by Labour in just under 18 months.
If the project is not delivered on time then the Prime Minister’s solemn vow is loud enough. He is expected to shoulder political responsibility come what may. Anything short of that is ‘shame on who’ exactly, Mizzi?
George Pullicino is the Nationalist Party’s spokesperson on energy and water conservation.