A second major power failure in just 10 days raises questions that need to be answered urgently. GERALD FENECH analyses Malta’s precarious power situation
Friday evening, 7.35pm. Most of Malta and Gozo was out, as the traditional Good Friday Processions were drawing to a close. All of a sudden, complete darkness – just like the fateful day when Christ died on the cross 2,000 years ago.
This was the second nationwide power cut in just 10 days, with the last one occurring on March 22 at around 4:30pm. On that day, Enemalta had said that a fault in ‘Boiler Number 7’ (which now boasts cult status) had led the whole electrical generation system to trip, causing utter chaos, with power eventually being restored as late as 11:30pm in some localities.
Friday’s blackout was no different, although it occurred around three hours later on a day where electricity demand is not normally at its peak. In fact, according to a detailed Enemalta statement, the load was only around 202 MW on both power stations. But apparently, Turbine no 2 at Power Station Delimara was put in service to meet this demand.
During this switching operation, the turbine failed to synchronise in time and this led to the plant in Delimara being overloaded. This resulted in a rapid drop in frequency throughout the network. It remains to be seen whether Turbine Nr 2 will have a fan page opened on Facebook, to accompany its cousin in Marsa.
Enemalta also said that the engineers in Delimara Power Station attempted to manually synchronise the turbine but were not able to complete the operation in time as the evening peak load approached.
“This inevitably overloaded the system and the protection devices in Delimara operated immediately, thus shutting down the plant. At that time, Marsa Power Station tried unsuccessfully to stabilise the situation but because the load previously carried out by Delimara was far too big to cope with, the protection systems in Marsa were also activated, resulting in the total shutdown of the system,” Enemalta explained.
After about half an hour, power began being restored to the San Gwann area, which was only to be plunged back into darkness again a few minutes later. Eventually, San Gwann had power at about 8:45pm, with all other localities following suit although again, according to Enemalta, power was still out for 15% of the island by 11:30pm. It was only at around midnight that power was restored to all localities – a wait of around four and a half hours for the worst afflicted.
In stark contrast to the March 22 power cut, there was no press conference by Minister Tonio Fenech, nor any justification by the Finance Ministry of the need to get going on the Delimara plant expansion.
However the Department Of Information yesterday published a letter sent by Minister Fenech to Enemalta’s CEO, Ing Karl Camilleri, where he immediately requested a report on the situation regarding power cuts and also wrote to outgoing chairman Alex Tranter requesting the setting up of an ad hoc committee to examine the country’s energy generation in the short term.
It does look like the situation has become quite alarming although at least there appears to be some movement on the government’s side to begin tackling the problem.
In fact these cuts are something to be expected from now on, as the Electricity Generation Plan drawn up by Enemalta in 2006 clearly states that if no infrastructure upgrading is carried out then power outages are an expected occurrence as from 2010. gfenech@mediatoday.com.mt
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