Large parts of Malta were hit by a power cut yesterday afternoon due to a fault in new Sicily-Malta interconnector, which at the time was being used at nearly maximum capacity.

Among the several Maltese towns and villages affected were Valletta, Birkirkara, Naxxar, San Ġwann, Rabat and Sliema.

The power went out at about 4.45pm but was restored about two hours later when the Delimara power station was switched into high gear to produce the required energy lost from the interconnector.

Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi said the fault occurred on the Italian side, but no explanations had been supplied by the Italian authorities by the time of going to print.

Dr Mizzi said that when the outage occurred, the interconnector, which has a capacity of 200 MW, was supplying some 190 MW to the electricity grid, or more than 50 per cent of the demand at the time.

He said the outage showed Malta could not just depend on imported energy and needed to have enough generating power domestically.

The Delimara power plant currently has a generation capacity of 444 MW.

An all-time new electricity peak load of 438 MW was reached on July 23.