The new Delimara power plant will miss its third deadline and will not be generating any electricity by the end of summer as promised by Minister without Portfolio Konrad Mizzi, the Times of Malta is informed.
This newspaper has also been told that Enemalta could not be sure it would start receiving commercial amounts of energy by year’s end.
Sources close to Enemalta, which, on behalf of the government, signed a still unpublished 18-year power purchasing agreement with Electrogas, the owners and operators of the plant, attributed this latest delay to the late arrival of the LNG floating storage unit.
“Although at first it was thought the summer deadline was feasible, as work on the regasification unit by a Greek company was at an advanced stage, it seems the LNG tanker is nowhere near arriving in Malta by September 21, the sources said.
This means that, although the government has been pushing us to have some kind of visible media stunt to show that the latest deadline was achieved, this has to be postponed once again, they added.
More than a month ago, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, his chief of staff, Keith Schembri, and Dr Mizzi travelled to Singapore to attend a “sail away ceremony”.
Originally, the new power plant had to be up and running by March 2015. The two-year timeframe pledged by the Labour Party for the project’s completion in the run-up to the 2013 election had been queried by different quarters.
When asked about this, Dr Mizzi always insisted “it is doable” and that “all was on track”.
Then, in December 2014, when the project had not even started, he acknowledged there would be a significant delay.
Speaking in Parliament, Dr Mizzi set June 2016 as the new deadline, adding he was ready “to accept all the political flak” due to the delay. As that deadline was also missed, both Dr Mizzi and Dr Muscat mentioned a third deadline.
“The new plant will be producing energy by the end of summer”, Dr Mizzi had told this newspaper. Dr Muscat was not as categoric and, on August 21 he said on One Radio the conversion of electricity production to gas from oil would happen in “the coming months”.
The government has been reluctant to say exactly what stage the LNG plant has reached and when it will come on stream.
A few weeks ago, a spokesman for the Prime Minister told the Times of Malta there would “soon” be a media event when new timeframes for the power station would be announced.
Four weeks later, no such event has been held yet.