The power cut crisis that we experienced during July seems to have subsided. It was a nightmare for Enemalta. Dealing with so many damaged cables while public pressure mounted was not an easy task. Company employees must be commended for the work they carried out.

We were told, over and over again, that the cause of so many faults in the networking system was not a result of overload, but of the lengthy heatwave that hit the islands. When, 13 years back, the Nationalist administration of the time had blamed the rising temperatures for a nationwide blackout, Labour MPs had laughed it off as an excuse and tried to gain political gain from the incident. Well, Labour is now using the same line to explain what happened in July.

Karma is coming back to bite the PL also when it comes to the cost of power cuts. In 2010, then Labour MEP Edward Scicluna had calculated that the power cut had cost the country €20m. Taking the cue, the PN has calculated that July’s lengthy and persistent cuts, which hit many localities, had come at a price of €200m.

Whether the heatwave is the real cause of the power cuts and if the economic damage of the problems on the electricity grid was so high is not something that we can determine ourselves. What we can comment about is that politicians need to me more careful with their words. It often happens, as it has happened to Labour, that what they say about their political adversaries will turn against them. Sometimes it takes years, but it still happens.

At least an apologetic Miriam Dalli, the minister who is politically responsible for the energy sector, was honest enough to admit in an interview carried in The Malta Independent on Sunday today that what happened in July meant that the investment made by the Labour government was not enough. There is a need, she said, for the government to accelerate its investment on the country’s electricity grid, and it is with this in mind that, next year, the government will spend €30m on this, instead of the €15m that were originally planned.

It was a much better response to the crisis than what Deputy Prime Minister Chris Fearne gave in reply to an Opposition request to have Parliament urgently convened to discuss the power cut crisis. In his letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, explaining why the government was refusing such a proposal, Fearne said that the government is doing its utmost “to strengthen an electricity system that the Nationalist government had left completely abandoned”.

Fearne seems to have forgotten that Labour has been in power for more than 10 years, during which time Malta had Konrad Mizzi, Joe Mizzi, Michael Farrugia and, for the last two-and-a-half years and counting, Miriam Dalli as ministers responsible for energy. Added to this, between April 2016 and June 2017, energy fell under the direct responsibility of then Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, who took on this portfolio from Konrad Mizzi following the Panama Papers scandal. So we’ve had five Labour energy ministers in the last decade.

What is clear is that the Labour government has been found napping, if not in a deep sleep, with regard to climate change. The way Prime Minister Robert Abela has spoken during and after the power cut crisis made it seem that rising temperatures is something that happened overnight, with the result that Malta was caught unawares. This is not so. Global warming is not a 2023 phenomenon; it has been with us for decades. So much so that it was in 2019 that the Maltese Parliament, with Abela still an MP at the time and a few months away from becoming PM, had declared a climate emergency.

The problem is that, since then, Malta has done little, if anything, to address the situation, and the power cuts we experienced last month are a strong indication that the government did not do enough, as Dalli admitted in today’s interview.

At a meeting with the social partners, Abela also announced the setting up of an authority to monitor the impact of climate change and coordinate action to mitigate its effects. Here again, the government is late in its reaction. The establishing of such an authority, or agency, had already been proposed way back in 2009 and now, 14 years later (10 of which under Labour), we’re still in the planning stage.

We’re halfway through summer and one or more heatwaves could still strike, long before the acceleration in investment in the energy distribution network will start. We keep our fingers crossed that the next heatwave will not be so devastating. And, maybe, by next summer, enough would have been done to not have a repetition of the July crisis.