The problem that caused last week’s blackout, which affected large parts of the island, was on Malta’s end of the interconnector and not in Sicily, the Times of Malta is informed.
According to senior Enemalta sources, the interconnector, which at the time of the fault was carrying about 190MW of electricity, tripped due to faulty settings at the Magħtab terminal station.
“It is not true that the fault was from Sicily’s side. Energy continued flowing from Ragusa but the preventive system settings at Magħtab were too low for the high voltage carried. This caused the system to shut down automatically, leaving the island without an adequate supply,” the sources said.
Soon after the blackout on August 6, Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi said the widespread power cut “was caused by a fault that occurred on the Italian side”.
Enemalta later said the fault was a result of a severe storm over Sicily “as lightning struck the Sicilian network infrastructure”.
Enquiries by this newspaper show that although Ragusa and other areas in its hinterland were affected by a storm at the time of the blackout in Malta, the electricity supply in Sicily was not interrupted and no power outages were reported on the Sicilian network.
This was also confirmed by sources at Terna, the Italian company responsible for Sicily’s grid.
The preventive system settings at Magħtab were too low for the high voltage carried. This caused the system to shut down automatically
“The supply to the Malta interconnector remained constant and was only interrupted as a result of a fault at Magħtab,” the Terna sources said.
In a joint statement on Tuesday, when this newspaper had already started making inquiries about what had caused the interconnector to trip, Enemalta and Terna announced that an inquiry had been concluded and engineers from both companies agreed that “the protection systems at the Malta-Italy interconnector’s Magħtab terminal station disconnected the electricity supply to prevent damage to the Maltese network”.
The Times of Malta yesterday asked Enemalta for a copy of the conclusions but they had not been supplied at the time of writing. Enemalta was also asked to say whether the settings of the preventive system in Magħtab were made according to protocol at the time of the blackout. No replies were forthcoming.
The Sicily-Malta interconnector, a €220 million investment part financed by the EU, was inaugurated in April.
The 200MW interconnector, which allows the island to import and export energy, was being used to almost full capacity at the time of the blackout.
According to Dr Mizzi, when the incident happened, Malta was getting 190MW of energy through the interconnector, which translates into more than half the total energy demand at the time.
Following the outage, the Delimara power plant had to be run at full capacity to make up for the lost energy flow from Sicily.
Apart from the 200MW through the interconnector, Delimara is capable of generating an additional 444MW, giving the island a total capacity of 644MW.
Last month, an all-time electricity peak load was registered, reaching 438MW.