‘The Best in (Stone Age) Europe’

Such a shame that pressing [Control+S] on your keyboard is not a competitive event at the Olympics. With all the practice I’ve had in the past two decades, I’d win gold every time.

There: I did it four times just to type those two sentences alone (and another twice again to type this one). Honestly, why do so few people appreciate the precise co-ordination of motor neurones that is required to perform such a complex task? How can anyone not marvel at the simultaneous transmission of so many electrical impulses, through such a labyrinthine nervous system, in order to precisely synchronise the activity of millions of muscles you never even knew you had? 

It’s so unfair. The one activity I have had uninterrupted practice at for over 20 years, and I can’t use it for anything other than saving some article or other.  Oops, almost forgot: it’s about that time again. [Control+S].  Phew, I feel so much safer now...

Meanwhile, I’ll try and keep this quick... because if there’s one thing that being alive in this country teaches you, it is that ‘electricity’ is not a commodity you can ever take for granted. In fact, you can always tell someone’s been born and raised in Malta by the sheer amount of candles, matches, torches, oil-lamps and emergency generators they always keep within arms’ length at home.  (I, alas, am an exception. No matter how many random power cuts I experience, I just never learn to stock up on the bare essentials for survival in the 21st century).

Hang on a sec: [Ctrl+S]. Right, now where was I?

Because that’s the thing with sudden, unpredictable interruptions of power supply: they disrupt your train of thought. Earlier this morning I sat down at this computer with a mug of a coffee, and an article already mapped out in my head, just waiting to spill effortless out onto the screen (the article, not the coffee)... when, [Click!] There isn’t a screen for it to spill out onto anymore. 

Then there’s the small matter of being temporarily unable to restart your computer once the power has been restored; those moments of sheer panic when it informs you (on the umpteenth restart attempt) that it has to launch an ‘emergency scan’; then the hours of anxiety, after the only option you were given was to ‘restore your computer to an earlier date before the crash’.

That all happened to me this morning. How am I supposed to concentrate on writing this [Ctrl+S] with all this other stuff occupying my mind?  

In a sense, however, it’s probably all for the best. Let’s face it, you don’t want to become over-reliant on something like ‘electricity’ in your daily life. You never know, there might be some global catastrophe some day that would send civilisation as we know it hurtling all the way back to the Stone Age. Just think of the survival advantages, having been brought up to consider everything you’d have lost as an unreliable commodity anyway...

Perhaps that is, in fact, the whole point of this seemingly endless series of intermittent power cuts. We are being prepared for the aftermath of an inevitable future energy crisis. And they told us so, too: remember? Malta was to become a ‘centre for excellence’... ‘the best in Europe’, etc. 

Of course, they never specified the epoch by whose criteria the competition would be judged. In an age without electricity... yes, we certainly would be ‘centre of excellence’. And we really would be ‘the best in Europe’... by late Palaeolithic standards.

But until that global energy crisis comes rolling along... we’re going to have to face the fact that we are still struggling to provide even the barest of necessities for civilisation to even exist. Exactly how we can keep up the aspiration of a ‘centre of excellence’ - when we can’t even maintain a regular energy supply for more than three weeks - is beyond me.

And it looks to be a problem we won’t be able to fix any time soon. For unlike most routine technical or mechanical hiccups, there are two dimensions to this particular mess: the infrastructure side of things, and the political side of things. And both are now so hopelessly intertwined, it has become almost impossible to disentangle the wires.

Let’s start with the infrastructure. Within a few hours, Enemalta came out with a press release explaining some of the details. We were told that “capacity was lost after the Malta-Italy Interconnector transformers tripped due to a technical difficulty during a scheduled maintenance operation at Enemalta’s terminal station at Ragusa.”

It added that: “Enemalta dispatched additional capacity from its emergency plants at Delimara, from the gas-powered engines of the Delimara 3 plant (Delimara 3 Power Generation Ltd) and from the Delimara 4 CCGT plant (Electrogas Malta Ltd), which is currently undergoing operational testing ahead of final commissioning. Through this capacity, electricity supply to most customers was resupplied within a few minutes.”

Already, you can see why it is impossible for the issue not to be instantly politicised. In the public consciousness, ‘the interconnector’ represents the Nationalist approach to our endemic power supply issues; while the ‘new power station’ was the solution proposed by Labour at the last election. 

Until Enemalta’s statement appeared, that was in fact the gist of all the general reactions I’d seen. Roughly half the public responses were along the lines of: “It was probably because of the PN’s interconnector, and Labour’s power station had to come to the rescue’: with the order reversed by the other half.

The explanation might vindicate one half and not the other, but I can’t see what difference that can possibly make to the problem itself. Who gives a toss whether it’s the interconnector’s fault or not, anyway? The reality of the situation is that we are currently using both interconnector AND power station in our energy mix; and a combination of both PN and PL models can clearly be seen not to work.

Even from the perspective of political mileage, it’s a double-edged sword. Gonzi’s actual vision for the interconnector (and to the best of my knowledge the PN hasn’t departed from it since) was that it would work in conjunction with the existing BWSC plant anyway. Labour’s alternative system did not foresee doing away with the interconnector, either. The degree of interdependence may have varied, but both visions involved interplay between locally-produced and foreign-imported energy. 

Looking at the bigger picture, the two parties’ energy strategies are actually not very different at all. And that’s before considering that we haven’t even seen either one or the other strategy properly in place yet. 

With Gonzi’s plan the reason is obvious: he wasn’t around long enough to deliver it. With Joseph Muscat, however, it’s a different story. 

Labour’s original energy plan, unveiled in 2013 (cue to ‘Alice in Wonderland’, etc.), was markedly different from the one we’re actually experiencing today. Had it been delivered intact, the ‘operational testing ahead of final commissioning’, mentioned in the Enemalta press release, would have actually taken place two years ago... and the plant itself up and running ever since.

In fact, if the interconnector is to blame at all, it is partly for the simple reason that we shouldn’t currently be using it to service 75% of our energy needs. There is more than one screw-up at work here: and while the technical fault at the Ragusa end can always be excused as an operational imprevisto... the failure to deliver such a vital electoral promise is slightly harder to forgive.

Either way, we are clearly no nearer to a permanent solution to our ongoing energy crisis than at any other point in the last 40 years.,, with the small proviso that our energy needs have shot up exponentially since then. Perhaps we will become a ‘Centre for Palaeolithic Excellence’ earlier than even I predicted...