Government to give families €25 compensation payment for power cut

The government has today decided to grant families who suffered a 12-hour power cut during last week’s outage a €25 ex gratia payment.

During a Cabinet meeting held this morning, government decided to grant the payment as a good will gesture.

According to Enemalta, €25 is equivalent to what an average family consumes in electricity in 10 days. It is estimated that 8,000 households will be benefitting from this one-time payment after a number of streets in four localities directly fed by the Marsa distribution centre spent up to 18 hours without power supply.

Although government is not bound by law to give compensation, energy minister Konrad Mizzi said “such power cuts are unacceptable.”

Damage to cables linking up to the distribution centre in Marsa on Tuesday evening caused a fire which, in turn, led to an explosion. The Marsa and Delimara power stations were automatically turned off as a precautionary ‘safety trip’ and the nationwide outage ensured.

Whilst power was restored to most localities by the late hours of Tuesday night and early hours of Wednesday morning, some Qormi, Marsa, Haz-Zebbug and Luqa were left without electricity as late as Wednesday afternoon.

Moreover, in the coming weeks government will be holding a number of meetings with business leaders to explore ways to facilitate bill payments.

Last week, the Small Chamber of SMEs (GRTU) demanded that the government offers compensation to business outlets that suffered “great costs” during the blackout.  

The extensive damage caused to the distribution centre has limited the availability of alternative distribution channels in the region and Mizzi said that Enemalta is carrying out temporary works to guarantee energy supply and restore alternative connections to be in a better position to swiftly adapt to any other unexpected faults without disrupting supply.