Your editorial Enemalta’s investment (TMID, 22 June) did not tackle the issue in the most comprehensive way.

A common feature in most discussions about Enemalta and electricity generation is a failure to distinguish clearly between the power of a particular device and the quantity of energy it produces over a period of time. So the new Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) will have a power of 100 mega watts (MW). If operated continuously for 8000hr (most of a year) it will deliver 800,000 MW/hour of energy.

In identical fashion, a bar heater of 1KW power operated for one hour will consume 1KWh of energy, which is the “unit” used by Enemalta or WSC in making up electricity bills. So it makes no sense to say that “the link to the European grid and the new plant will create 300MW (!) of electricity annually”. What the link and new plant will do is to add 300MW to the generating capacity.

As for the quoted content of the editorial, there is much that must be taken rather carefully. So a cable link with Sicily will enable us to buy energy from any European country “at competitive rates”. That is conceptually possible; indeed it is done in the UK for instance on a small scale, where a consumer in Manchester can contract to buy electricity from a non-local supplier – Scottish Hydro, say.

What actually happens is that the local supplier buys the same amount of electricity from Scottish Hydro as the Manchester consumer takes from him. But there is no evidence that this is in fact possible on a European scale and certainly not with very short-term contracts. Minister Gatt may be indulging in wishful thinking or suggesting the advent of relief to local consumers battered by ever rising surcharges. In any case are European energy prices and particularly French prices, seeing France routinely exports to all its neighbours, significantly lower than ours?

There is another point about the cable link. It has to be used rather heavily to justify its capital cost and not just lie fallow until we run into trouble. In fact its prime function will be to supply power on a routine basis.

The editorial made no mention of the fuel likely to be used with the new CCGT. The present CCGT uses diesel, but this fuel may drive Enemalta beyond its NOx emission allowance. There was mention of a natural gas supply by pipeline or terminal at the press conference, without any hint of capital costs, time scale for coming on stream, and cost of fuel. Both pipeline and terminal (liquid natural gas imported by refrigerated tanker) supply would require a complete switch to gas as a generation fuel to justify the capital cost. We could go further by using natural gas as a transport fuel.

Wind energy was labelled as requiring “high capital costs”. As government has dismissed, on patently inadequate grounds, the two cheapest forms of wind energy – on-shore and shallow off-shore – that statement about high capital costs is a little fatuous, as is the “close monitoring in other countries of offshore wind farms with a seabed depth in excess of 50m”. Can we know where these “other countries” are and who is doing this “close monitoring”? A search on websites of wind energy associations does not show much trace of such work. Besides, is the Vienna tender still about to come out are has there been a rapid retreat from Vienna tender to Brussels monitoring?

E.A. Mallia,

Attard