In spite of the ominous signs that have been appearing on the horizon for months on end, the past week must definitely go down as a bad week indeed for the Maltese alternative energy sector

The more government tries to blind us with mega alternative energy prototype projects that are mainly untried and untested to create a false sense of momentum, the more we should realise that they are falling short on deliverables in the renewables sector – particularly in the short to medium term.

It was indeed shocking to hear Enemalta’s executive chairman state that generating renewable energy is almost impossible and extremely difficult.

There was little reassurance in the fact that after the customary lip service that our dependence on oil will be partly reduced by connecting Malta to the European energy grid through ‘an interconnector’, he noted that the installation of what is termed as the longest AC cable in the world is still in the approval phase.

It is shameful that so close to the end of this legislature, the government is in the chairperson’s own words still in the process of identifying selected government-owned buildings in order to install photovoltaic panels.

One cannot share the certainty with which Mr Giordmaina spoke of Sikka l-Bajda as a given when this will still be undergoing tests for the next two years, and the relevant EIA is still being carried out.

Equally unsettling is the news that the Delimara power plant extension will be fully operational by the first week of July, when only last week we were told that Mepa has extended the monitoring process regarding the impact of heavy fuel oil till at least June of next year. A definite confirmation that the heavy fuel oil/gas oil dilemma will not have been addressed as it should have long been by the time the general elections are held.

While Minister Debono and this time round the whole Gonzi Cabinet continue to take us for a ride on the eco-Gozo project by claiming that it is moving into its second phase, when it is common knowledge that the minister continues to stubbornly refuse to publish the full 300-page document relating to the eco-Gozo project that we support in principle, it was also bad news to learn that Malta Enterprise had once again been forced to temporarily suspend the energy grant scheme after it noticed that certain quotations submitted by beneficiaries may not be in bona fide.

I am in no way implying that it should have turned a blind eye, but given that these instances have occurred in the past too, arguably under other schemes, one would have expected that internal procedures should or would have been tightened well before any such abuses surfaced.

The corporation seems to have thought otherwise.

So much so that rather than taking the necessary preventive action it seems to have only asked the internal audit committee to review compliance with internal procedures, only once the irregularities did surface.

In view of government’s silence on the issue, it is in the public interest to know how many applications happen to be pending, how many of them have been found to have been irregular, as well as for how long will the scheme remain suspended.

The GRTU apologetic blog statement that the MRA scheme remains unaffected, and that only the Malta Enterprise scheme which mainly targeted businesses and factories will be suspended, is shameful coming from an organisation that claims to represent business interests!

This brings us to the Mepa extension of the heavy fuel oil monitoring period.

Things went off to a bad start from the very beginning.

For reasons still unknown, testing was delayed for some 7-8 weeks. Perhaps, belatedly, Enemalta might choose to enlighten us further.

After the original fanfare carried in the columns of this newspaper, Minister Fenech took more than some time to outline and highlight the advantages of higher thermodynamic efficiency.

According to experts in the field it does seem that there may have been unpublicised problems.

In terms of timeframes, a September 2012 approval or rather decision right in the middle of a possible election campaign could prove to be politically embarrassing.

Public protests regarding the potential approved use of fuel oil could cost it some votes.

On the other hand, the new revised date of June 2013 might be safer politically since by then the elections should definitely be over.

I am in no way questioning the competence and or integrity of the British experts brought in from the Air Quality Management Resource Centre at Bristol University since after all they were apparently chosen by the Monitoring Committee itself, but one feels rather queasy about the over simplistic statement that the extension of the relevant condition to the IPPC permit tends to imply that the decision was unanimous when in actual fact alternative scenarios are known to have been suggested.

What this means in effective terms is that the trial period of the extension running on heavy fuel oil will now run for longer than expected.

When the permit was issued in December last year, with Mepa allowing the Delimara extension to use heavy fuel oil – albeit for a temporary period – the conditions had required that Enemalta was to carry out ambient air monitoring and also establish whether the extension should be run on gas oil instead of heavy fuel oil.

Whether such a date line for such a feasibility study will be kept remains a mystery so far.

Originally such a feasibility study should have been completed by December of this year while considering various gas fuel options.

All this justifies the concerns that the local councils of the south and their environmental experts had publicly expressed before the December 2011 hearing when they made the point during a detailed presentation to the Mepa board in which they not only highlighted their concerns but also the reasons as to why gas oil should have been used instead of HFO to operate the new extension.

It remains shocking indeed why on earth government had advocated HFO as from the initial stages of the project, when gas oil and perhaps even gas, should have so quickly become the most favoured option.

As a bare minimum, the DPSE should have been devised to run at least on gas oil from the very beginning only to convert to gas at a later stage, without any undue delay.

In reality, we were unable to go for gas due to government having got its priorities wrong while totally lacking any vision in the energy sector.

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Leo Brincat is the Shadow Minister for the Environment, Sustainable Development & Climate Change