Three months before the election, the Labour Party had unleashed a mantra that the Nationalist government had been sacrificing peoples’ lives as a result of lack of vision on energy. It torpedoed the BWSC plant, the interconnector infrastructure and the studies for large-scale renewables.
A new face was put across on all media fronts as the be-all-and-end-all of energy. He pledged to have a road map for energy. He would not reveal it then but, sure enough, he made us believe he had one.
The mud stuck. The newcomer eventually became the minister for energy who, in the past few weeks, has authorised the issue of a tender to formulate an energy road map for this country.
What is this all about?
Formulate a road map which he said he already had not so long ago? Formulate a road map when he committed this country to a redundant power station at a cost to the taxpayer of over €500 million? Formulate a road map when he authorised the sailing into Marsaxlokk of a floating supply unit which represents a hazard of monstrous proportions in itself?
Formulate a road map when he goes about negotiating with China and Turkey to collaborate with them on energy-related projects? Formulate a road map after hosting a conference in Malta to approve what had already been agreed to by the previous administration: an offshore permanent LNG terminal to link the EU with North Africa?
The lack of coherence of this minister is truly impeccable. The tangle of ideas, his rash initiative and his ‘circular road mapping’ will hurt us in the long term. He steers his ministry in a disjointed effort. He wants to collaborate with China on servicing renewables but gives us no clue on how he plans to meet Malta’s renewables targets.
Instead of charting out the territory in a well-thought out road map on renewables to prepare university and Mcast students for the energy of the future he hides his national renewable action plan from all of us because he has no clue or he is secretly negotiating elsewhere.
He signs an 18-year-long LNG contract and accepts that all Malta needs is an offshore LNG terminal to supply third countries and the eventual LNG power station.
How he persists to subject the south to such hazards when, last July, he spoke bravely of Malta’s offshore floating LNG vision is just bewildering.
His tender to draft an energy road map is too little, too late when he has an interconnector, ready to be switched on, but which will only use 20 per cent of its total capacity to make way for the 200MW power station that, come what may, the government is committed to purchase electricity from even if not needed. The government has no option but to buy this electricity unless it wishes to pay a penalty for not purchasing the amount of power stipulated in the contract signed with the private consortium.
The lack of coherence of the energy minister is truly impeccable
In all this mayhem on energy, the minister has also expressed himself on the existing national energy plan for Malta which, until today, he has not yet disowned.
All of his initiatives run counter to what this national plan states.
On the one hand, the minister wants to retain the policy to circumvent the necessary studies and dash on with his projects to please the selected few but, on the other hand, goes in a diametrically opposed direction when considering what the plan lays down, being in breach of a document approved by the previous Parliament.
All of this he does undisturbed and unopposed because he has generously distributed the savings recovered from the BWSC plant to Joe Public. Joe Public, in return, remains complacent in the hope that utility bills are eventually discounted.
The hype that surrounded this topic before the election has blown up in all our faces now.
The PN’s vision on energy has not yet been proved wrong. The large-scale renewable projects that were devised, the use of HFO as a temporary fuel until it is replaced by LNG, the offshore floating LNG terminal, to cite but a few measures, have not yet been replaced.
Our new energy minister was more efficient about getting his better half on a sure footing rather than inspiring confidence in the topic that powers our lives now and in the future.
George Pullicino is a Nationalist MP.