Every July, Eurostat publishes its renewable energy league table, and every autumn, Castille picks the line it likes. This week, the Energy Ministry selected 18.8 per cent as Malta's 2025 renewable energy consumption share. Minister Miriam Dalli described it as evidence of a nation "slowly reducing its reliance on fossil fuels." The press release then ranked Malta ahead of Belgium, Slovakia and Ireland, and the newspapers printed the ranking as fact. That figure itself survives any check against the Eurostat table. Its ranking does not survive a second column of the same table.

Eurostat measures renewables in three ways: electricity, heating and cooling, and transport. Malta ranked last in the EU on electricity, with 11.2 per cent deciding if lights stay on. Czechia sat next at 19.2 per cent, Slovakia at 24.1 per cent, and the Union as a whole reached 49.9 per cent. The Regulator for Energy and Water Services describes the situation more clearly in its 2026 national report. Renewable electricity generated in Malta and fed into the grid supplied 7.7 per cent of what consumers used in 2025. The other nine-tenths came from gas burnt at Delimara and from the cable to Sicily.

So how does a country last in renewable electricity climb to 18.8 per cent? The answer sits in the heating and cooling column, where Malta scores 47.5 per cent on the latest full-year data. Brussels allows this under the Renewable Energy Directive. That law lets member states count the ambient heat that reversible air-to-air heat pumps draw from the air. In Maltese households, those devices are simply called the air conditioner on the wall. Every split unit that warms a bedroom in February adds renewable energy to the national ledger. Nobody installs a panel or a turbine in the process.

That column inflates the total beyond all reason in a nation where people need heating for six weeks. Eurostat publishes all three columns together on a single page, allowing the ministry to see the 11.2 per cent next to the 18.8 per cent. It opted for the greater number and excluded the lesser one from the release. The government understood the mechanism well enough to exclude it once. Malta's final National Energy and Climate Plan targets 11.5 per cent by 2030, excluding ambient cooling from heat pumps. Castille has since raised the target to 25% and counted the heat pumps in.

Malta claims to have surpassed Belgium, Slovakia, and Ireland, but those countries get their percentages through more effort. Ireland generated 40 per cent of its electricity from wind in 2025, against 47 per cent from gas and 4 per cent from solar. Belgium runs nine offshore wind farms with a combined capacity of 2.26 gigawatts, one of Europe's five largest fleets. Last year, those turbines provided 8.2 per cent of Belgium's electricity, exceeding the total supplied by all of Malta's panels here. Slovakia draws on hydro along the Danube and the Váh.

Malta has no wind farms, onshore or offshore, and solar supplies 97 per cent of its renewable output. A country that gets 11.2 per cent of its power from renewables has not overtaken countries that get 40 per cent from wind alone. It has overtaken them on an accounting convention.

The sunshine argument then goes in the opposite direction. Marsaxlokk gets approximately 1,840 kilowatt-hours of solar energy per square metre annually. A panel on a Gozo roof produces three-quarters more electricity than the same panel in Flanders. Thanks to that advantage, Malta has set up 268 megawatts of photovoltaics, roughly 470 watts per person. Belgium, under its grey skies, has installed 994 watts per resident, more than double Malta's figure. The Dutch, despite having less sun, have exceeded 1,400 watts per person. Nature gifted Malta with the best solar resource in the Union, yet the wettest countries in the Union have utilised theirs more effectively. The release calls geography a constraint; in solar terms, it is Malta's single greatest advantage. Flat roofs, a 36-degree latitude and 300 days of sun amount to a head start, not a handicap.

Malta's own targets repeat the pattern on a larger scale. The Union has bound itself to 42.5 per cent renewables by 2030. Malta's national objective, the one the release calls ambitious, stands at 25 per cent, the lowest in the bloc. Starting from 18.8 per cent, it takes roughly 1.2 percentage points annually, which is less than the 1.6 points Malta achieved in 2025. A target that the current pace already beats is a floor dressed as a summit. Running ahead of Belgium on a track Malta drew for itself wins nothing. Malta has also paid for its place in the table before. In 2020, the government bought 20 gigawatt-hours of renewable statistics from Estonia for two million euros. Not one watt crossed the Baltic; the deal moved numbers between spreadsheets, so Malta met its 2020 target. The Energy and Water Agency must say whether any such transfer sits within the 2025 figure.

This does not argue against the rooftop panels. Those 36,243 households and firms put 268 megawatts on their roofs, and the credit belongs to them. Systems of 11 kilowatts or fewer make up 97.5 per cent of the stock: a transition built one roof at a time. The argument is against a press release that measures the wrong thing to produce the right headline. Gozo learned in August what the right measure looks like. Two of the island's three feeders failed, and Gozo went dark for five hours. No air conditioner counted as renewable energy that night. At the July demand peak, Delimara's gas turbines and the Sicily cable carried 85 per cent of the load.

Honest reporting starts from the electricity column and works upwards, and the ministry had every number at hand. It says: last in the Union on renewable power, 7.7 per cent from panels, no wind, a 25% target that trails everyone. Then it adds the good news: a sixfold rise since 2012, batteries doubling, 351 gigawatt-hours harvested from roofs. That version shows respect to both the reader and those who paid for the panels. The version the ministry issued ranks an air conditioner above an Irish wind turbine and calls it progress. Spin is cheap; the cable to Sicily and the second interconnector are not. The government promised the second cable for 2027. Until its arrival, Malta's energy transition is best measured by each summer blackout rather than any Eurostat figure. Readers who sat through August in the dark know which number counts.