The government's decision to compensate consumers who suffered power cuts during the heatwaves of July and August is a welcome acknowledgement that electricity interruptions carry a real cost for households and businesses.
Yet compensation, however justified, should never become the measure by which Malta judges the resilience of its electricity system.
Under the scheme announced on Friday, residential consumers who experienced cumulative interruptions of at least six hours during July and August will receive between €60 and €110, depending on how long they were left without electricity.
Those identified through Enemalta's systems will receive the credit automatically, while others who believe they qualify may apply separately. Non-residential consumers will have their own assistance scheme.
For families who endured hours of exceptionally high temperatures, lost food from refrigerators and freezers, or had daily life disrupted, such payments will provide some recognition of what they experienced.
Businesses, particularly establishments whose operations depend on a continuous electricity supply, likewise know that an outage can mean lost income, damaged stock and frustrated customers.
It cannot end with compensation. Malta has experienced repeated concern over electricity supply during periods of intense summer demand, and the country must continue asking whether its infrastructure is developing quickly enough to meet the pressures being placed upon it.
Those pressures are unlikely to disappear. Malta's population has grown over the years, development continues, economic activity places greater demands on the grid, and increasingly intense periods of summer heat can push electricity consumption higher precisely when reliable supply is most important.
This makes investment in the distribution network, generation capacity and other energy infrastructure a matter of long-term national resilience rather than simply a response to individual summers.
Work carried out after previous disruptions must therefore be assessed according to whether it produces measurable improvements for consumers when the system is under its greatest strain.
The government has said that it remains committed to investing in a stronger and more resilient electricity system.
That commitment needs to remain a priority, because resilience is ultimately demonstrated not through announcements made after an interruption, but through fewer interruptions occurring in the first place and a system capable of recovering quickly when faults do happen.
There will, of course, always be circumstances in which failures cannot reasonably be prevented.
No electricity network can be guaranteed against every technical fault, accident or exceptional event, and extreme weather is placing pressures on infrastructure across Europe.
The reasonable expectation is not perfection, but preparedness, sufficient investment and a system able to withstand foreseeable increases in demand.
Compensation schemes also need to remain what their name suggests: exceptional measures responding to exceptional disruption.
If they become a familiar feature of every difficult summer, attention risks shifting from preventing disruption to managing its consequences.
The payments announced for this summer should therefore be viewed as one part of the response, not its conclusion.
Consumers who experienced prolonged outages deserve recognition for the inconvenience and losses they faced, but they deserve something more important as well: confidence that every lesson from those interruptions is being used to strengthen the network.
A resilient electricity system is essential infrastructure for a modern country.
Malta's objective should be straightforward: not simply compensating people when that system falls short, but steadily reducing how often compensation becomes necessary.