According to the figures given in parliament, the average Maltese household spends just around €450 a year on electricity, an extraordinarily small sum that causes me to wonder whether they are all tampering with their meters, going to bed when the chickens do, and washing themselves in cold water and their clothes by hand, also in cold water.

These pathetically small bills sound unfeasible to me. Ours is a five-person household with no air-conditioners or electric space-heaters. We cannot use them because Enemalta has not yet bothered to upgrade the electricity supply to our house, claiming instead that we must pay several thousand euros to have the upgraded supply brought a few metres down from the main road. So we are forced to be a minimum consumption household whether we like it or not, and still our bills are rather large, mainly on the basis of a clothes washing-machine that never rests, a dish-washing machine, and two bathroom boilers. And that is one reason why I regard the average consumption figures with some degree of suspicion.

And yet, despite these tiny bills – for they can only be classified as tiny, by contemporary western European standards – and the fact that an incredible 30,000 households are exempted from paying the surcharge on electricity, the news that this surcharge is to go up to 95 per cent has predictably thrown the country into a panic. There is nothing we love more than a good crisis. It is OPEC and the early 1970s all over again. The panic seemed so great then that I actually remember it, even though I was in primary school. OPEC was the word that reverberated through my childhood like Suez did to an earlier generation. My mother still laughs at the memory of a couple of women she knew, from families notorious for their thriftiness, who in the midst of the OPEC crisis walked miles from their homes to a discount food store, and walked all the way back with their heavy purchases, to score on both food and fuel savings, even though they were quite well off.

Which are these 30,000 households and how are they chosen for exemption? I imagine that it is on the basis of income, which means that the next question follows on naturally from that: do we really have 30,000 desperately poor households in Malta, which cannot even pay for their electricity? Hmmmm. It annoys those of us who pay the full surcharge whack that others are spared, allowing them to carry on spinning their washing-machines with impunity, confident in the knowledge that others will be paying their bill. Because here is the thing: for 30,000 households to pay no surcharge at all, everyone else has to pay 95 per cent. If everyone were obliged to pay their fair share of the burden, it would not have to be that high.

Another irritation is that figures on generated electricity that goes unaccounted for cannot be confirmed. How much electricity disappears every year or is stolen? We need to know, because we are apparently being made to pay for it. If inefficiency at Enemalta is reduced, we might be better off in that respect. And it is particularly annoying that news of the surcharge comes in the wake of that other piece of news that the government – for which read the people – has spent hundreds of millions of liri on trying to save the unsalvageable shipyards. If the Labour Party ever grunts on about government waste and spending again, this particular example should be rammed forcefully down its throat. It seems that Joseph Muscat, with his objections to the privatisation of the yards, wants us to waste even more millions there.

The government subsidy on electricity is costing a pretty penny, too: €37 million in the nine months between October and June. The government does not earn money through productivity; it collects money off the productive. So when the government says that “it” is subsidising the cost of electricity to the tune of €37 million in nine months, what it means is that it has collected €37 million from tax-payers and given those €37 million back to them – or to others – in the form of electricity bills that are lower than they should be. This is not a tenable situation.

If electricity has become impossibly costly because of the escalating price of oil, then somebody has to pay for it. There is no magical solution that involves the government discovering trees which grow money, sprouting alongside those other trees which grow spaghetti. In this context, “the government should do something” is a vain plea, because there is almost nothing that the government can do, except do away with the present system that involves forcing one group of people to subsidise the electricity consumption of another group of people.

Predictably, the current crisis has drawn the natural energy obsessives out of the woodwork, with their bleating about solar power and wind energy. The logic in their arguments is as false as their knowledge of business and the bottom-line is unsound. Because the sun does not charge a fee for shining, and because the wind does not collect a consideration, then the conclusion is that the power that may be generated from these two sources is free. The huge cost of exploiting them is not factored into the equation. The brutal fact of the matter is that it costs more to produce energy by alternative means than it does to produce energy by conservative means. The capital investment is enormous, and more so because it cannot always be centralised in one public utility, leading to great wastage of resources as each household kits itself out separately. All that equipment has to be manufactured, and, surprise, it is manufactured using conventional electricity taken off the grid.

The Sunday Telegraph has a rather good column by Jeff Howell, a professional builder who gives sound advice on matters to do with the construction and fitting out of homes. Last week, his column was about this subject. None of the measures proposed by the British government to reduce electricity consumption has ever been independently proved to save or produce more energy than that which is consumed in their manufacture, he wrote. The proposal that bothered him most was the target for one in four homes to be fitted with “solar heating equipment”. Howell has often written about the mis-selling of solar heating through myth and legend about its uses, and says that each time he receives a large and abusive postbag. Last week, he wrote: “I think it is worth spelling out once more in clear terms just why commercial solar heating systems can be such a rip-off.”

He went on to explain: “The first point to note is that (apart from in specially designed buildings with south-facing glazed areas and high thermal-mass walls, or large underground thermal storage tanks) the power of the sun cannot be stored to keep a house warm in winter. Solar energy collection using panels on the roof – that is commonly sold as solar heating – is only a method of warming the water used for showering and bathing, which constitutes a surprisingly small proportion of the total bill for most households.” In other words, you will be spending on a capital investment of several thousands of euros just to have “free” hot water in your bathroom and kitchen taps. Machines for washing clothes and dishes are outside this savings loop because they are fed with cold water directly from the main supply, which they themselves heat to the required temperature, so they have to use conventional electricity.

Even if you think the cost of installing solar panels is justified in terms of savings on hot water for baths and showers, you still have to be linked up to the grid unless you are happy to take cold showers every day during three consecutive weeks of rain and clouds in January. Solar power generated in the sunny months cannot be stored for the rainy months, and the irony of solar panels is that they are most productive when they are least needed. You do not want a hot bath in August, when your panels are churning out the hot water. You want it on a bleak day in February, when there is no sun to heat enough water for a bath.