For the last two weeks this newspaper has run consecutive articles on the viability of the new gas-fired Delimara power station being up and running by next March, as per this government's self-imposed deadline.

To cut a long story short, it looks like there is not a snowball's chance in a very hot place of that happening.

We have sent numerous questions to the government on the issue but we have been met with a wall of complete silence. We have filed Freedom of Information requests about the contract covering the deal, which have been refused.  NGOs have called for safety studies to be published but they too have been ignored.

Our two consecutive articles that raised serious questions on the timing of the project, as well as other articles carried in our sister daily publication, have elicited absolutely no reaction whatsoever from the government. 

We visited the site itself and saw with our own eyes that hardly a finger has been lifted on the new project, despite the looming deadline. We then managed to extract a statement from one of the project's lead partners, Siemens, to the effect that it is still to invest further in the project.

So when on Friday, a journalist from this newsroom finally had the opportunity to confront the Prime Minister on the matter, the Prime Minister chose to dodge the question of whether the power station would be up and running come next March as pledged. 

The Prime Minister instead retorted to the effect that the government's energy plan and the pledge to reduce energy tariffs for industry did not exclusively depend on the completion of the power station project.

Some may very well have viewed our persistence on the issue as an exercise in nitpicking. But this, those people should be reminded, is the largest capital project supposedly underway in Malta. It is also a project that defined the last general election. Energy supply and prices were the Labour Party's hallmark in the last election and they were issues that arguably helped in no small way to sweep the Labour Party to power in March 2013.

During those weeks of heavy campaigning back in early 2013, the Labour Party had said time and again that the new power station was essential to its pledge to reduce tariffs for households and businesses alike. As such, the Prime Minister's piecemeal explanation that the new power station is not necessarily essential to reducing tariffs now beggars belief.

In October of last year, the Energy Minister had said that energy bills for households were reduced by the promised 25 per cent last March - a year before the projected date of the commissioning of the new power station - because Enemalta had sold off a holding company for €30 million. Next year's equal reduction in industry's electricity bills, he said, would be possible as a result of the new power station being up and running.

But, on Friday, the Prime Minister failed to explain how energy tariffs for industry would be reduced, and the new and improved lower rates for households maintained, if the new power station is not operational by March 2015.

Something is either not adding up, or the government has yet another ace up its sleeve that it is still to play.

As such, the Opposition leader was quite right to have questioned the financial scenario yesterday when he questioned where the funds for the next reduction of the energy tariffs would come from, emphasising that the country would need to pay for these reductions from elsewhere.

In addition to the project itself, there are a number of other lacunas surrounding the planning process, not least of which are the safety aspects posed by the floating storage unit (FSU) ship that is supposed to be berthed in Marsaxlokk Bay.

This week, NGO Din l-Art Ħelwa raised some very pertinent points along these lines when it called on the government to publish the nautical risk assessment for the FSU. The NGO recalled how in December of last year, Transport Malta had confirmed that a full nautical risk assessment would be carried out on the proposed gas storage tanker to be berthed at Delimara - studying the potential impacts that the gas storage tanker and its supply ships could have on nautical traffic in the bay.

While the NGO had requested that the nautical risk assessment be completed before the planning permit was granted, and after the quantitative risk assessment included in Enemalta's Environmental Impact Assessment had also recommended that a nautical risk assessment be carried out, the permits were issued in March without the crucial study.

Moreover, as the NGO also observed, Mepa had confirmed last year that a Cost Benefit Analysis on the new gas-fired power station and the gas storage tanker was being carried out as part of the environmental Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control permit application, but that has not been published yet either.

When it comes to the new power station, at every turn in the road it is more a question of a complete blackout as far as the media, NGOs and the public is concerned, rather than light being shed on the progression - or lack thereof - of the project.

And after all that has been said and done when it comes to Malta's crucial energy sector, the people out there not only want, but deserve realistic and honest answers from the government - answers it is clearly unwilling or unable to provide.