In his excellent discussion (November 8) on Malta’s strategic vision on energy, Michael Zammit Cutajar drew attention to the country’s backward position with regard to renewable energy. While the substitution of gas for oil to generate electricity might have been a step in the right direction, gas remains a fossil fuel which needs combustion and therefore emits carbon dioxide.
As Cutajar also stressed, ‘renewable’ is the energy of the future and this is the vision of most advanced countries.
The long and sad story of wind energy in Malta needs recounting.
In 2004 there appeared to be a breakthrough for Malta. It was announced in the business section of the Times of Malta on February 3 that a private company was planning to invest just over Lm10 million in the setting up of a wind farm on Marfa Ridge.
The report included the prophetic statement that the “real hurdle” would be the granting of permits and overcoming “misconceptions that wind farms had a negative impact on the environment or that they were not financially viable”. The announcement unleashed a torrent of misguided and abusive objections to wind farms in the correspondence columns of this newspaper and elsewhere. The anti-wind energy abuse sputtered on for many weeks and the rest is history: what followed was a list of idiotic governmental blunders.
At the time, rumour had it that Mepa would approve the wind farm in December 2004 but, sure enough, the wind farm was turned down on misplaced unscientific prejudice and, possibly, politics.
In a rare fit of solidarity this proposal for a wind farm was even opposed by both parties in Parliament - again, based on unsubstantiated objections and prejudices. Even our Tourism Authority pitched in with absurd and unfounded fears about the effect of the ‘visual impact’ on our tourism.
A Mott Macdonald expert report had advised against dismissing out of hand the possibility of land-based wind energy as part of Malta’s energy mix for the short and medium term.
Malta remains at square one as a result of having been held back by prejudice, myopic vision and ignorance
Again, this advice was ignored when wind energy should have been an integral element in large-scale energy production from renewable sources.
A subsequent ‘Renewable Energy Policy for Malta’ report put the final seal to the government’s refusal to consider including wind farms in energy policies.
The original proposal of 2004 was made at a time when turbines were still relatively cheap and available. Unlike offshore wind energy, the technology was already advanced enough to invalidate virtually every uninformed objection made at the time.
In 2008 it was announced, as part of an electoral programme, that one of the future administration’s main projects would be the development of a “multi-million euro wind farm 20 miles off the island’s coastline” capable of producing between 75 and 100MW of clean energy. Not only was this putting the cart before the horse; it was also a hugely expensive champagne and lobster type solution which was a dead duck from the start. But it made a perfect ingredient for an electoral campaign.
Wind energy was still in its infancy in 2004. By 2008 wind energy was supplying around three per cent of Europe’s needs; this figure had more than tripled by 2015 and covered 11.4 per cent of electricity generation in a normal wind year.
It continues to increase and has now overtaken hydro as Europe’s third largest source of power. As anybody who has recently travelled in Europe will attest, the countryside is dotted with wind turbines. We have also recently had the amazing news that Portugal kept its lights on with renewable energy alone for four consecutive days in October.
By contrast Malta remains at square one as a result of having been held back by pre-judice, myopic vision and ignorance.
As a consequence of past misguided decisions, we remain near to 100 per cent dependent on fossil fuel oil. Had that proposed wind farm been built in 2005, it would by now have been into its 10th year of clean electricity generation. It would have provided valuable information on the advisability of expanding wind energy further in Malta by yielding a realistic estimate of the potential of wind energy in Malta.
We could have benefited in other ways: beside providing a significant amount of clean electricity and reducing Malta’s carbon dioxide emissions, such a project would also have provided a source of employment and 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.
While we have made progress with photovoltaic energy, we learned some days ago that wind power was to be ‘ditched’ for undisclosed reasons, after our government ‘revisited’ our renewable energy plans (November 3) – even though it has been widely accepted for years that energy diversity is the best way of maintaining energy reliability, protecting against interruptions of supply, sudden price rises, terrorism or other threats to reliability of supply.
It would be interesting to know the basis for the decision to exclude land-based and near offshore wind turbines in (shallow) coastal waters, if there was any.
Was the decision based on technical facts or on continuing bias or commercial agendas? It is time that an unbiased review was conducted in regard to wind energy in Malta.
George Debono is a retired doctor with a research background and a special interest in health and environment matters.