The report “Half of the Marsa power station to be shut down by May” calls for some comment.

Those “public consultations” were not so idyllic and informative as they may have sounded in the telling. For instance, there was no reply to the question of why, contrary to most international practice, we chose an alternating current (AC) link and not a direct current (DC) link for the Sicily cable. The choice has major bearing on the stability of the connection.

When we pointed to clear shortcomings in the Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), we were also given short shrift. The assumption that maintenance costs for DPSE were independent of fuel used does not make engineering sense; the “fuel-neutral” maintenance agreement signed by Enemalta and used in the CBA is based on estimates of HFO costs. Enemalta rejected our contention at the “consultation”, only for its communications co-ordinator to write to a Sunday newspaper a couple of weeks later, admitting that HFO maintenance costs could be as much as twice those of gas oil. That admission may not have been passed on to the writer of the CBA and was certainly not passed on to KPMG.

The CBA also looked at the so-called shadow cost of emissions. For use of HFO, arsenic and cadmium, present in very small amounts, were included; but the other metal pollutants − vanadium, nickel and lead – present in much larger quantities exclusively in HFO, were not mentioned. Mepa has now slipped in the single word ‘metals’ among the pollutants to be monitored in the eight-month trial, yet no adjustment to the CBA has been made.

There is the same slant in the CBA statement that the risks attached to the use of various fuels are essentially equal. A fuel that generates 31 t/day of hazardous waste that must be collected, stored, packed in containers and trucked by a round about route to the Freeport for export, must involve more risk than a fuel that needs none of the above. And this list still leaves out the 1-3 t/day of HFO sludge which needs to be treated and finally burnt as fuel in the boilers of old DPS.

But the CBA is in trouble even over the major DPSE pollutant, SO2 coming from the sulphur (S) in the fuel: HFO with one per cent S (10 kg/t of fuel); and gas oil with 0.1 per cent S, that is, 10 times less than HFO. So the CBA correctly says that HFO will require 10 times the quantity of S-removing reagent (sodium bicarbonate) as gas oil. Then, a little further on, there is a Table showing that HFO produces only two times the weight of SO2 produced by gas oil for every unit of electricity generated. Not even economists, never mind engineers, can produce that kind of alchemy. With 10 times the S content, HFO will produce 10 times the gas oil SO2 per unit generated and desulphurisation of HFO will cost, as originally said in the CBA, 10 times that of gas oil; and this if one wants to clean up the gas oil exhaust which one does not have to do to observe EU limits. (The need to clean up gas oil exhaust to improve the performance of the bag dust filters – put out by Enemalta – does not wash; bag filters work well with a different process of desulphurisation and with no desulphurisation at all.) Yet the CBA is not content with the physical alchemy; it has some money alchemy as well. For while 1%S HFO magically produces just twice the SO2 of 0.1%S gas oil, the abatement measures, even more magically, cost only 25 per cent more!

I was under the impression that KPMG are financial consultants not a group running refined physics experiments at CERN. But KPMG gave its estimate of bill increases to the second decimal place – a piece of pretentious nonsense. The statement “that a change in fuel… from HFO to gas oil alternative will induce an increase in fuel costs and abatement costs (my emphasis) of approximately €20 million” is slanted and grossly inaccurate. The abatement (desulphurisation) costs for gas oil are one tenth those of HFO; so those extra €20 million must arise from the higher cost of gas oil and not from higher “abatement measures”, as the report slyly suggests. How good is that estimate? To use no stronger words: dead useless. For a start, the KPMG “study” assumes that DPSE is going to run for 240 days non-stop at full power, from 5 May to 31 December. That is a demand which no engineer would countenance and which no machine can deliver. That apart, worked at that rate DPSE will produce 829,440MWh. But if half Marsa is going to be shut down when DPSE starts up, all the latter has to supply in the trial period is 307,000 MWh, a little over a third of the KPMG figure. Now, as it is extremely difficult to store large quantities of electrical energy, DPSE will not be asked to produce it unless there is some quite fantastic increase in demand. The respective fuel costs will be down to a third those of KPMG.

But there is more. When it comes to maintenance costs, KPMG gives the same treatment to HFO and gas oil; but Enemalta has admitted that gas oil maintenance costs could be half those of HFO, despite the supposedly ‘fuel-neutral’ scheme given in the CBA.

Putting in the above two corrections into the KPMG “study”, the extra overall cost incurred by using gas oil instead of HFO works out at €7.555 million, slightly more than one third of the KPMG figure of €19.925 million. And the supposedly mandatory increase in the current tariff would need to be only 3.9 per cent.

There is a further mess in the KPMG report, admittedly caused mainly by factors external to it. We have just been told by Minister of Finance Tonio Fenech that this is not the time to raise electricity charges. Now generation costs for the operation of DPSE for eight months will be lower than they are at present using Marsa to produce the same quantity of electricity, even if DPSE uses gas oil – a fact admitted by all and sundry. How come that an easing of financial pressure on Enemalta would lead to an increase in the current tariff, particularly as the present higher pressure does not warrant a rate increase? Can we have a decent answer, preferably from one side of one ministerial or institutional mouth to the above points, please?

E.A. Mallia

ATTARD