WATCH | Opposition to seek urgent parliamentary debate over repeated power cuts

Following days of repeated power cuts across the island, the Nationalist Party will request an urgent debate on Malta’s energy situation during Monday’s parliamentary session.

In a Facebook video, Opposition Leader Alex Borg said he will demand a clear explanation from the government about what is happening in the sector and seek a way forward towards summers without constant power cuts.

“We can’t have more excuses,” Borg said. “We need responsibility.”

After speaking with a number of affected families, Borg stressed that the outages are no longer isolated incidents, but a direct consequence of inadequate planning in the country’s energy distribution sector.

To corroborate this, Shadow Energy Minister Mark Anthony Sammut cited a 2024 report by the Auditor General, which concluded that the main cause of Malta’s power-cut problem was “a chronic lack of investment” in the country’s high-voltage network over the previous decade.

The report also found that the government’s annual spending on the energy distribution system was three times lower than it had been during the previous decade, all while the population kept increasing.

Sammut then highlighted the direct impact of the power cuts, citing a social media post by a woman whose husband has been diagnosed with cancer.

She said her husband missed an important medical appointment because their building’s lift stopped working during an outage and she was unable to carry him down four flights of stairs.

A 92-year-old man also complained that his electric bed was not working, saying he could not endure another summer night without air conditioning or a fan.

A third person said that, for the third consecutive night, she had been forced to choose between using the oven to cook dinner and washing her work uniform because the voltage problems in her building were so severe that several appliances could not be used at the same time.

“This is the fourth summer that people have suffered because of these power cuts. It is no longer a localised problem; it is happening everywhere. It is no longer limited to peak evening hours; it is happening in the morning too. People cannot keep enduring this.”