Malta has been afflicted by overnight power cuts this week.  Some localities have borne the brunt more than others, with some places going three whole nights without power or having to battle through almost 24 hours in one go of not having electricity.

This has come as Malta faces a heat wave which has battered much of the Mediterranean and Southern Europe.  Temperatures have soared to around 40 degrees celsius, and Enemalta said on Wednesday that this was the main cause for the power cuts which have left thousands upon thousands with ever growing frustration.

Social media has been awash with the frustrations of the people affected by these power cuts. Some have had to empty the contents of their freezer into the bin, while others saved the contents by migrating them to a relative. Some reported having to sleep on their balconies or roof in order to stave off the heat.  Others reported not managing to sleep at all.  Some more enterprising people said that they went to sit in the Malta International Airport and McDonald’s establishment close-by for some respite from the heat.

It is a desperate situation which one would not – and should not – expect from a first world country.  It is also a situation which we are seeing repeat itself year on year.  The last two summers also saw periods where homes and businesses were affected by a spate of power cuts.

Enemalta has blamed the heat for causing several faults in cables across the country which then resulted in the multitude of power cuts in the last three days.

It begs the question: summer has always been hot.  It shouldn’t take a Nostradamus to figure out that, particularly with global warming and climate change, there will be a much higher chance of heat waves and high temperatures.  So why hasn’t our infrastructure been prepared for this?  Are we to expect this type of thing to happen every single summer?  Enemalta must ensure that the infrastructure in place can deal with such temperatures.

There is also another point to consider: Enemalta insists that the heat is the main cause, but the vast majority of the power cuts are being reported either in the evening or even quite late at night.  By then the temperature, while still hot, will have subsided.  Perhaps out of ignorance of some principles of science, it makes one question how a cable can be damaged by heat at say 11pm – the time a number of power outages were reported on Wednesday night, for example – but not at 2pm.

This builds into the capacity aspect.  Enemalta insists that the electricity grid is not close to being overloaded; that the peak recorded output – 624 megawatts as of yesterday – is still not close to the capacity of 830 megwatts that the electricity grid has. But many people aren’t really buying this, with the belief being that the island’s consistent increase in population month by month and the failure of the electric infrastructure to catch up has a lot to do with what is happening right now.

Enemalta needs to get its act together. One cannot blame the people for being frustrated at the whole situation, in fact they have a right to be frustrated with it. This is only something else which adds on to the frustration which people are feeling with Malta’s quality of life at the moment.

One augurs that Enemalta does get on top of these power cuts, because if they don’t there’s more than a week of this heat wave left and that can only spell trouble for everyone.