Enemalta said today that a feature of its plans to upgrade its power generation facilities was the capability to restore power across the network in a much shorter time.

The corporation said that while it would continue to improve reliability, no guarantee could ever be given, anywhere, that there would not be power cuts.

The new generating plant would be comprised of eight heavy duty diesel engines, all of which would be capable of quick start - full load in less than 30 minutes compared to three to four hours for steam plan. These would complement the existing five quick start gas turbines giving a total quick start capability of over 300MWt.

A SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system to monitor and control the distribution system is also to be installed, and this together with the quick start engines would enable rapid re-energisation of the whole network.

The planned interconnector to Sicily would comprise two 225MW links, giving a total capacity of 450MW, and capable of an overload capability of 810MW for 1 hour (180%).

The corporation also insisted that the outage last week had nothing to do with lack of spare capacity.

Referring to a 2006 report, it said its current spare capacity was actually greater than projected because growth in demand had been slower.

"The implication that Enemalta did not have sufficient reserve capacity to cover for the tripping of the gas turbine on Tuesday 16th is clearly unfounded, at the time of the fault, there was one other gas turbine on standby, and following the fault, supply was restored to all areas."