Several areas in Valletta were again without power this morning, for the second day in a row.

Enemalta said this fault, which occured at 11.53 a.m., was another example of extensive road works putting a lot of stress on cables. Enemalta engineers were sent immediately on site and power was restored at 1.30 p.m.

Other areas have suffered power cuts over the past few days, including Sliema, Paola, Fgura, Tarxien, Lija, Attard and Mosta.

In a statement, Enemalta said that yesterday’s high temperatures resulted in the highest electricity demand recorded this year. The demand reached 425MW, so far only surpassed in 2007 when the demand reached 434MW.

Energy demand yesterday (8,867MWh) went well above the the peak load demand day in 2007 (8,696MWh) by almost 200MWh, meaning that even if the power load wasn’t as high as 2007, customers used electricity for longer periods.

The table shows the peak power demand and corresponding energy demand for the last 10 years. Since 2002, thepeak has moved from the winter evening to summer noon-early afternoon.  

Enemalta said that its current generation capacity stood at 571MW, well above the current demand.

It said that the latest string of power cuts caused by cable faults could be attributed to the high ambient temperatures and higher loads carried by the distribution cables.

These cable faults were partially due to the increase in load and the higher ambient and ground temperatures in summer, as well as higher loads.

The faults are caused by the increased expansion of the cables and the weakening of the insulation as a result of the higher operating temperature.

Although the cables are designed with these factors in mind, they may fail at weak points caused by a number of possible factors such as ageing, stressing caused by contractor damage or other system faults, or mechanical strain caused by the passage of heavy vehicles or road works. 

Out of around 2600 11KV circuits around Malta, only 26 circuits have failed in the past month. While four of these faults were directly caused by contractors, many more of them were on circuits which were previously stressed by third party road works contractors, Enemalta said.

Enemalta said that these kind of faults should stabilise as time goes by since the insulation around the cables would have normalised.

It said that although the power cuts admittedly caused great inconvenience to the localities affected, the demand of electricity lost throughout these outages was considerably small (about 4MW or less) when compared to the peak demand.

The corporation apologised for any inconveniences caused and reiterated its commitment to resolve such faults in the shortest time possible.