Infrastructure Minister Austin Gatt said yesterday that any source of alternative energy would be cleaner but more expensive than fossil fuel, especially if the price of crude oil continued to hover around the current mark of US$70 per barrel. But Malta must have clean energy, even if at a higher financial cost.

Answering a series of supplementary parliamentary questions by opposition MPs, he said that if the opposition continued to insist on wind farms at sea, the only place possible for one would be at Is-Sikka l-Bajda, and the project would still be very expensive. The only real possibility for affordable wind farms was on land.

Even so, land-based wind farms would have a minimal effect on the country's financial outlay for energy, while sea wind farms would have no effect and would have to be subsidised if the energy they produced was to be on a par with the cost of fossil fuel energy. There was no technology available yet that would leave a favourable financial impact.

To put the record straight, Minister Gatt said solar panels on the roof of a private household would have a bigger financial return for that household, and the government had long been subsidising this avenue. Even so, that household would not reap back its investment before nine years.

Experience abroad had shown that only large areas of solar panels could yet make commercial sense. Tunisia was working on a solar energy farm over a large area of its desert region, with the aim of selling energy to Italy. But there were no such large areas in Malta.

Dr Gatt said that another source of alternative energy was still largely undiscussed. The tapping of foreign energy through an interconnector with Sicily would give Malta a choice whether to get wind, solar or gas energy for its needs. While Malta generated 580 MW, Sicily had 1,500 MW from wind farms alone.

Dr Gatt said this was possibly the best alternative to share in alternative energy sources without the problems of cost and location of home-grown sources.