While admiring and to a large extent sharing Dr G Debono’s enthusiasm for wind energy (TMID 15 March) I cannot help feeling that he is too liable to allow his advocacy to get out of hand and so to damage the very cause he is rooting for.
For a start, his piece headed Alternative energy – Malta’s options has the quickest and best yield option – reduction in demand for energy – relegated to the back burner. There is no sense in a frantic search for substitutes for energy which we are in fact wasting – wasting, not using. So campaigns for electrical energy efficiency along the whole circle from generation to use, should not be “the other side of the coin”; they should be leading the charge.
Allied to energy efficiency campaigns – which can be extended to transport incidentally – there can be a drive for installation of solar water heaters on houses and other buildings. There are no technological barriers here, costs are quite low and some subsidy available. What is required is careful installation and use to get the most out of the solar heaters. On the other hand the case for solar-driven air conditioning is not so strong at present, simply because the technology is still some distance from the market; but there is a good potential when the technology is more advanced.
This is not to say that we should not be considering direct generation of electricity at this stage. The staff of the University Institute for Energy Technology (IET) have published a paper in the local scientific journal Xjenza on The Renewable Energy Potential of the Maltese Islands; it deals with solar water heating, photo-voltaics (PV), wind and with waste treatment to produce methane.
This last aside, Dr Debono is correct in singling out onshore wind as currently offering the cheapest renewable source of electricity, even if a 55GWh wind farm will provide about 2.5 per cent rather than five per cent of current electricity production. The Marfa ridge proposal, while targeted by knee-jerk and generally uninformed opposition, has never received any formal reply from the Malta Environment and Planning Authority, probably because Mepa has yet to formulate serious planning guidelines for wind farms.
Perhaps Dr Debono is not aware of the background to the Prime Minister’s remarks. There is a report from the Resources and Infrastructure Ministry which has not been published locally but can be downloaded from a Brussels website. This carries a near-total dismissal of on- and offshore wind farms at least up to 2010 and probably well beyond. Many of the reasons given are superficial, some are factually incorrect; but that does not seem to worry anybody, least of all the PM. Micro-wind, for use on dwellings, for which the PM provided financial incentives in the 2006 Budget, is ruled out on the basis of non-existent planning restrictions; small wind (incorrectly called ‘medium wind’) is found to be “too expensive”; no hint as to possible sites was given.
The report has no mention of “reclaimed land” as a site for offshore wind farms. Dr Debono is correct in describing such prospects as “pure fantasy”. However he is too dismissive about “our deep waters”. The IET renewable energy paper identifies seven sites with useful areas with a sea depth of less than 20m.
The Brussels report buries at least five of these under objections from every man and his dog or, as the in the case of Is-Sikka il-Bajda, declares them to be “marginal” on the basis of a fake, unquantified comparison with “international offshore sites”. An area off the north coast of Gozo, which detailed, long-term wind data shows to be a prime site, is inexplicably left unmentioned.
As for Dr Debono’s “gigantic size of wind turbines”, he falls into the trap that opponents of wind energy have spun. Our circumstances suggest that we should not install turbines of more than about 900kW power. The marginal penalty in cost of electricity compared to 1 and 2 MW turbines is amply rewarded by the diminished visual intrusion.
Yet Dr Debono must not despair. The ministry has employed consultants on a mission to go where no wind farmer has gone before – to turbines placed in 50m of water, near to those sites declared “marginal” in view of the extra costs (shallow) offshore wind entails! Even more hopeful are the two recent statements by the PM.
One is that an onshore wind farm can provide “only” three per cent of current generation. That suggests that the PM looks at savings of over Lm2 million (three per cent of the recently published Enemalta fuel bill for generation) as not worth bothering about.
The other is that the question of wind power is “being seen to”. We have recently received news by carrier pigeon from Germany, that the government has engaged consultants to look into the problem of putting wind energy on the grid. Again the PM seems to be unaware that some aspects of this problem have already been tackled by locals.
E.A. Mallia,
Attard