Power cuts expose planning failure, former ERA CEO says

Enemalta has received a damning indictment from former Environment and Resources Authority CEO Ruben Abela over the recent electricity disruptions.

In a scathing opinion sent to MaltaToday, Abela argues the power cuts were not simply the result of extreme temperatures but exposed years of inadequate infrastructure planning.

Abela says the focus on heatwaves, cable faults and emergency repairs risked overlooking the wider issue that infrastructure failed to keep pace with Malta’s rapid population growth, tourism expansion and construction activity.

A planning expert, Abela is reacting to a technical briefing Enemalta officials gave the press last week, where they attributed the outages to record demand and heatwave pressures on the network. The company CEO even expressed surprise over the record peak demand reached, which was almost 12% higher than the record peak registered in 2023.

“The current crisis is best understood not as an electricity failure but as a planning failure,” Abela writes, saying the heatwave merely exposed pressures that had been building for years. The pressures, he notes, are directly linked to an economic model “heavily dependent on construction activity, continuous tourism growth and sustained population expansion driven primarily by imported labour”.

He says official figures show that between July 2023 and July 2026 Malta’s effective summer population, residential stock and households with air-conditioning units all increased at rates broadly matching the rise in peak electricity demand.

Abela says peak demand reached a record 741MW this summer, compared with 663MW in 2023, an increase of around 11.8%. During the same period, he estimates that Malta’s summer population grew by 9.5%, housing stock by 10.2% and households equipped with air-conditioning by 12.4%.

“Malta is not only housing more people. Malta is cooling more buildings,” he writes, saying the combined impact of population growth, tourism, construction and rising air-conditioning use was placing increasing pressure on the electricity network.

Abela says the wider problem is the failure to anticipate the infrastructure implications of growth. “The challenge was not merely producing electricity but delivering it to growing concentrations of demand,” he writes.

He calls for a shift in how development is planned, saying: “Infrastructure planning should precede development rather than react to it.”

Abela is an architect and civil engineer specialising in land-use planning and urban design, with postgraduate qualifications in environmental management and conservation technology. He worked at the Planning Authority before becoming ERA’s first chief executive and currently manages projects at Heritage Malta.

'Yesterday’s infrastructure is now being asked to carry tomorrow’s economy'

Similar sentiments over the lack of foresight to anticipate demand, are also made by economist JP Fabri in his regular column in MaltaToday.

Fabri says the real question is not whether Malta can continue growing but whether it is investing in the “invisible infrastructure that allows growth to remain sustainable”.

“In the end, electricity was never really the story. It was simply the first warning that yesterday’s infrastructure is now being asked to carry tomorrow’s economy,” he argues, adding the recent outages show that Malta’s electricity distribution network had little to no redundancy.

Meanwhile, despite Enemalta fixing the faults on the high-voltage cables that caused widespread outages, several streets in various localities remained without electricity for much longer.

Some streets in San Ġwann, Msida and Bormla went days on end without electricity or with intermittent supply.