From Dr A. M. Bezzina
Energy and water will become more and more difficult to procure in the future. On this there is no doubt. When this will become critical is however debatable, hopefully not before another 20 or 30 years. It will be a time when mass tourism from and to distant lands will be a thing of the past. It will be a time when installations for alternative and renewable sources of energy and water will be a necessity and their deployment will not be blocked by the future heirs of the Tourism Authority, MEPA or Heritage watchdogs however noble their work may seem at present.
The quest for renewable sources of energy and harvesting of rainwater will entail massive investment and unpopular government policies. Everyone, from the very top to the very bottom of Maltese society, must fully understand that such an infrastructure cannot be implemented instantly in response to a crisis that will occur most surely in my lifetime and which will plague the lives of our children and our children’s’ children. Setting up the infrastructure concurrent with a massive drive in obliterating waste, will be the heritage that will matter most to future generations of Maltese who will have to eke out a living on a sun-scorched rock surrounded by fish-depleted seas. Our forefathers unwittingly left us a rich heritage that helped us prosper. It is up to us to build a purposeful legacy that will help our descendants to survive. We should look after ourselves and stop expecting to get help until the end of time even from friendly countries. There may come a time when everyone takes care of his own, every man for himself.
Renewable sources of energy bring up two important but related issues that need to be faced. The first is the expense involved. Spread over a 20- to 30-year programme the yearly expenditure would not be small. The cost will have to be borne by us, by everyone, with big or small wallets. The second issue is the willingness of the authorities to warm up to the idea that there will be large sums of money flowing out of the country to purchase hardware. It will not prove friendly with our country’s trade deficit. This is, I believe, a prime reason why projects financed by EU cohesion funds happen to have a high local value-added factor with relatively small expenditure on imported material and equipment. The road network and the announced rainwater harvesting galleries are two fine examples of what I mean, the latter a very praiseworthy and indispensable project. These projects suck in foreign currency into the country and leave most of it in the local economy.
Talk of installations “paying for themselves after so many years” or “systems not competitive with current energy prices” must be taken out of the equation. When there will be no water and fossil fuel supply is used as a weapon to influence western policies, our children will thank God that we ignored financial common sense today. It also makes sense to spend it now when tourism is still a good foreign currency earner rather than when climate change will cause tourist numbers to dwindle again. If temperatures keep rising, summer will not be the tourist season anymore but a health hazard.
Major stumbling blocks in setting up renewable sources of energy and water include a prolonged payback time on massive capital outlay and energy may not be on line whenever we demand it while energy storage options are limited. An integrated system of energy storage and energy utilisation at peak output would have to be orchestrated. Mass use of domestic electrical storage systems, such as batteries, is not feasible given the present technology, both from the environmental and from the material resources point of view. The situation must be viewed similarly to making lemonade when the Lord gives you lemons. By increasing storage of potable water we can increase output of water by desalination when we have excess power. Peak power generation can be stored as compressed air and/or by pumping second-class water to a height and tapped as small-scale hydroelectric power. The system can be integrated to even out or delay energy delivery for short-term peak power demands.
Two other issues currently delaying a renewable energy programme are the visual aesthetics of generating systems and the limited amount of land available in Malta. The government’s choice of singling out deep-sea off-shore wind farms as the only significant wind power option is in my opinion a delaying tactic to keep at bay EU requests for increasing renewable sources of energy on our island. The technology does not yet exist and if or when it will ever be available it may be more expensive than the use of photovoltaic panels (PV). The tourism authority has shot down the option for near-shore wind farms. Our descendants will thank the esteemed members of the authority when tourist numbers come down concurrent with climate change but also because of energy supply issues. A variation worth exploring for off-shore wind farms is the possibility of installing land based wind farms on mainland Europe, including Sicily, feasible if the 200MW capacity (please make it 600MW) connection to the European electricity grid materialises. Financing, owning and installing one or two extra wind turbines at major European wind farms could possibly supply more than a third of our country’s electrical power needs.
Subject to further evaluation, our options for renewables would consist of wind energy as the large scale energy option, solar-electric, solar-thermal (including solar cooling) and sea wave energy. They all need a large capital outlay and a lot of space.
Financing the project
Collectively, GDP per capita in PPS (purchasing power standard) is directly related to consumption of energy and other resources. Individually, people who spend a lot of money are more wasteful of energy and other resources. They have a larger carbon footprint than others who have no money to spend. Similarly, those who earn a lot of money but spend little would also have a small carbon footprint. The concept here is that spending is related to energy demand so the act of spending should be taxed (some classes of essential items may be exempt) to finance the renewable energy infrastructure. In effect such a tax is a consumption tax like VAT. In a similar way that the government has raised the VAT rate from 15 to 18 per cent to finance the new hospital and the ever-increasing expense of the health system, so can it be raised to prepare for an inevitable water and power shortage in future? State-of-the-art hospital facilities will be of little use if power and basic hygiene from adequate water supplies are unavailable in 2030. You can never convince enough citizens to part with a hefty sum to pay for a rather expensive domestic photovoltaic and a micro-wind turbine who may see a return on their investment in 20 years’ time. The paradox is that many a Maltese find no objection to part with much larger sums to install elaborate home decorations with no tangible return on their investments at all! Revenue from such a tax would have to be audited and used exclusively to purchase hardware. Contractors installing the systems would have to be paid from normal government revenue to avoid abuse of the cash windfall and the “gravy train” attitude.
Pooled revenue for this purpose allows the selection of more advantageous installation sites, increased cost effectiveness because of economy of scale, centralised maintenance and use of single AC converters rather than multiple small systems dispersed singly on individual rooftops. More than this, it allows occupants of apartment blocks or residential towers to take part in the overall project even though the majority would feel that they might not want to participate. But then everybody would rather not pay any tax either!
Space
Since Malta has succumbed to building mania, rooftops should be considered as a valuable resource for installing communal mid-sized PV arrays with a centralised converter feeding into the grid. Initially the choice should be for unutilised rooftops of public and large private (eg industrial) or government-owned buildings. Large buildings should be offered the chance of first refusal if solar cooling for that building is projected. The possibility of installing on other European land if a Sicily channel cable is laid has already been touched upon. Rooftops are also a valuable resource for harvesting rainwater. Wells are not a universal feature of Maltese buildings anymore. When wells are full, overflow will still be lost. The establishment of local communal reservoirs to collect well overflow or roof runoff from buildings without wells should be considered. Rooftop rainwater runoff has the advantage of having less hydrocarbons and toxic dusts than rainwater collected from street level. It can also be redistributed locally as second-class water for flushing water closets and irrigation of gardens with minimal treatment.
Payback incentives.
Once a sizable set up is established and significant energy is being generated, a system of tax deductions should start to be implemented but with a reversed “social conscience”. The idea is that though tax is being forcibly taken when money is spent by the individual, the system is an investment by the people doing the spending and the biggest spenders contribute the most to the project and should have the biggest benefits in tax deductions. These would not be available to those already receiving energy subsidies or have low incomes. Apportioned rebates would be based on total declared income. In order to encourage energy conservation, the full allotted tax rebate is only given if the individual’s domestic energy consumption is not higher than the highest annual domestic consumption in the preceding three or four years. Bonus rebates may be given if annual consumption is less than 85 per cent of the average domestic consumption in the preceding three or four years. This consumption tax and the rebate system may be abolished when the whole project is deemed completed and part of the revenue from utility bills will be than channelled for maintenance, replacement and running costs.
The advantage of such a project plan is the gradual installation of parts of the infrastructure over 20 to 30 years. Thirty years is considered the lifespan of PV systems and some wind turbines. At the end of the project the older first installed units will be due for replacement or a major overhaul. The annual system of gradual installation would also benefit from improved technology during the course of the project by utilising newer more efficient units.
We should all reflect on the future needs of our descendants. Without seeming too alarmist, thinking that the future will be forever rosy amounts to burying one’s head in the sand. Should I have been too pessimistic about the future then at worst we would have an infrastructure in place that would be more respectful of our environment and help reduce our recurrent energy costs and dependence on non-renewable resources.
Albert M. Bezzina
MOSTA