The Prime Minister in now putting the blame of the current power outages on an upsurge in electric cars and the strain from the shore-to-ship project, the Nationalist Party said in a statement on Friday.

These are all “excuses”, the PN said in a statement signed by the Shadow Minister for Energy, Ryan Callus. What is happening is a result of a lack of planning on the government’s part, due to its “incompetence”, and a consequence of an outdated policy.

The PN said that electric cars have been in Malta for years and there was enough time for the government to plan for them; however planning and investment was not done since the government is “incompetent”.

It said that Abela’s second excuse is due to the introduction of shore-to-ship, a project by the government itself. This means that the government is so “incompetent” that it is not even able to plan for the increase in demand by its own project, the PN said.

The PN said that “conveniently”, Abela continuously tries to make the people forget that the major problem with energy distribution is the fruit of an expired policy that “rotted” the country and led to an increase in the population. It said that this had the result of putting great stress on the existing distribution system.

The PN concluded in saying that all this means one thing: incompetence, the only problem Maltese energy distribution has is the Labour government. “The country needs a change”, it said.