Switched off from reality

Another summer heatwave, another wave of blackouts, and once again this government’s script remains unchanged. With temperatures topping 43°C and peak demand reaching a record 710MW, underground cables across Malta and Gozo are failing, leaving communities in darkness for hours or days.

After 13 years in office, blaming the weather has worn thin. The human cost is severe. Vulnerable citizens relying on oxygen machines, stairlifts, or refrigerated medicine are left stranded, small businesses lose spoiled stock, and parents struggle to cool infants through sweltering nights. This is no longer a technical hitch; it is a breakdown of public health and basic dignity.

The crisis extends beyond outright blackouts to damaging voltage fluctuations outside the legal 10% threshold of 230V. Citizens who install protection regulators to safeguard expensive appliances find them constantly tripping because supply cannot stay within safe limits. Forcing families to choose between destroying appliances or living in sweltering darkness is an indictment of our grid.

The government points to €140 million invested between 2023 and 2025 as proof of action. Yet spending money and solving problems are not the same thing. Streets have been dug up and resurfaced only months apart, yet outages persist.

When pressed in parliament for a precise itemised breakdown of cable purchases, installation, and excavation costs, the minister offered only a generic total figure without a single detail. This evasion makes an independent technical and value-for-money audit unavoidable.

There are engineering questions too. Countries with far higher average temperatures than ours do not suffer cable failures on this scale every summer.

It is fair to ask whether our specifications for burying and spacing underground cables are adequate for heat dissipation, and whether contractors reinstating roads afterwards are properly supervised. Furthermore, it is fair to ask where the regulator has been throughout this debacle.

The Regulator for Energy and Water Services (REWS) exists to hold the operator to account, yet it has stayed largely silent while thousands of consumers suffered outside the legal service standards it is meant to enforce.

The public still has not seen Enemalta's Network Development Plan, which the regulator must receive and assess every two years by law, nor audited accounts for the last three years, nor an explanation of what became of tens of millions of euros linked to carbon credit transactions reported missing.

This crisis also exposes a wider gap in our climate planning. Extreme heat is no longer an anomaly; it is the new baseline. Yet the national strategy meant to prepare our infrastructure for exactly this stress remains stuck in procurement, long after it was legally due.

This summer's suffering should force that work to be finished, with the grid stress-tested against future heat levels and population growth rather than yesterday's assumptions.

Compensation as a right

Compensation for those affected should not depend on ministerial goodwill. Enemalta operates as a partly privatised company with commercial obligations, and in most other European countries consumers affected by prolonged outages receive automatic compensation as a right, applied directly to their bills by the regulator. That is the standard this country should aspire for, rather than treating redress as a favour handed down from government.

Rather than confronting any of this, the government has spent the past fortnight shifting blame anywhere but onto itself. At one point it even suggested responsibility lay with the Enemalta workers, who have spent this heatwave repairing faults around the clock, often in dangerous conditions. Those workers deserve recognition, not scapegoating.

The real record is set out plainly in the National Audit Office’s own report. High-voltage network investment in 2023 stood at roughly a third of what it had been in 2014, even as population growth and energy demand surged under this government’s own economic model. That is over a decade of underinvestment under a Labour administration, not a legacy of anyone who came before it.

Most telling is the government’s refusal to even discuss any of this. Last week, government MPs on the Public Accounts Committee blocked a discussion of the Auditor General’s report into the 2023 supply crisis, on the pretext that it should wait for an updated version.

Families who had just endured days without electricity were effectively told parliament has no time for them until autumn. Separately, a no-confidence vote in Energy Minister Miriam Dalli has been delayed. Why is the prime minister afraid of putting the motion to a vote now? Why is he so weak with his ministers?

The heat is beyond anyone’s control. Whether our grid can withstand it, whether public money is spent effectively, and whether parliament is allowed to scrutinise any of it, are not. Those responsibilities sit squarely with a government that has had 13 years, and two consecutive terms under the same minister, to get it right. It has not, and it is the people of Malta and Gozo who keep paying the price, one blackout at a time.