An act of irresponsible madness that will break Malta’s back
If Muscat’s aim is to be a Dom Mintoff for the 21st century, he’s certainly getting there with his electricity roadmap which will, if the madness is allowed to go ahead, throw Malta into a bottomless pit of exponentially-increasing public debt that is 100% pointless and non-productive.
Just as Mintoff did when he tried to screw Her Majesty’s government for more money on the lease, using the primitive methods learned at his usurer-mother’s knee, and they reacted by refusing to renew that lease on their military base here, leaving him with a hole of millions in the public coffers and a workforce of thousands at the Drydocks, and no ships to repair.
To save face and enable himself to present this whacking great catastrophe to the Maltese public as a major success still being celebrated by historically-illiterate morons today, he kept all those drydocks workers on the payroll, and the rest is economic history.
Here’s Mark Anthony Sammut (who is, besides being very politically aware, also an engineer) in his latest column:
To put things into perspective, Malta has a base-load of around 160MW during the night and an average of 240MW during the day, with peaks during summer of around 450MW.
If the government binds itself to constantly buy 350MW of electricity from these two suppliers 24×7, it will be most of the time wasting this energy, apart from leaving dormant a 200MW interconnector cable, an investment costing €200 million which enables us to buy electricity at prices which can sometimes be up to three times lower than the fixed price Labour planned, at which Electrogas will sell its energy.
Not mentioning another 180MW of spare generation at Phase 2 and 3 of Delimara which Enemalta will still own…..
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Dritt ghal gol-hajt. Never did it ring truer.
Mintoff was in office a few years after Independence and when Europe was feeling the yoke of the Berlin Wall. This barking mad Muscat is living in the 21st century, European Malta for goodness’ sake!
Numbers cannot ever be contradicted.
Which is what the PN should resort to.
Just let the Kurt Farrugias carry on with their empty taunts betraying their plebeian nature.
And that isn’t an insult if this has to be a real republic.
The Nationalist Party is incapable of understanding numbers. It understands laws, but not numbers.
Is anyone still doubting the main cause behind Muscat and his merry bunch’s behaviour?
http://stoptheabuseinfo.hubpages.com/hub/how-to-deal-with-narcissistic-people
And:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbv4ss-u77A
Thank your for the first reference – extremely enlightening and very informative.
No thanks for your second – extremely sickening and absolutely repulsive.
Have Dr. Muscat and Konrad Mizzi, enough intelligence to understand the facts as presented by the very knowledgeable Mark Anthony Sammut?
I hope they can see the disaster in the making that is facing us all in Malta – whether we voted PN or PL – and act accordingly.
Yes, of course they understand the facts, they just don’t care. It’s the money in their bank accounts they care about.
Whats the fuss? We can then use the interconnector to sell the surplus electricity to the European grid – at a price below the French, of course.
There is no interconnector, nor any word or sign that there will be one when the fabled power station is on stream.
At a monopolistic (for us!) high price imposed by the Chinese.
When the European grid does not need it and can buy cheaper energy from right across Europe.
Pull the other one.
Freedom5, a good point. However, obviously, this did not cross the mind of the very alert engineer.
I think Malta should not rely on 1 or 2 power stations. A small power station can be built in Gozo.
This should be linked to Malta and provide energy to Malta if the need arises. Energy needs will surely rise in the future and it is better to have spare capacity than suffer a lack of capacity, as can be seen from the Mater Dei hospital.
No, you did not read what he said or you do not understand what is going on.
The Chinese and Electrogas want to sell ALL of their output to Enemalta whether they need it or not.
And you need to understand how an electricity works along with your freedom buddy.
If the power stations were left in the hands of Enemalta, they could keep spare reserve and use it as necessary. As they won’t be, then they can’t.
David rarely hears, reads or understands anything.
Correction. How an electricity market works.
A small power station in Gozo.
You will now give us a feasibility study and how this suggestion beats economies of scale.
C’mon David, we’re all ears.
Muscat will do whatever it takes to save face. He does not care about Malta, its economy or its people.
It is all about himself and the people he has made promises to.
If one of the directors of the failed Cafe Premier made a commission on the ‘deal’ struck with the government, you can rest assured that someone is going to be making a big fat commission here and by hook or by crook the deal will go through.
To all those focused on lower electricity bills: do you just want a lower electricity bill today and astronomical ones later?
With the type of slippery language Muscat uses that is exactly what he will tell you: that he only promised lower bills for the immediate future, that in the process he may be screwing you over for the future would not be his concern.
The PN would have lost the election anyway, but why wasn’t the issue put into simple terms like that from the very beginning?
Isn’t it sad that we got caught up in KPMG presentations, spreadsheets we could not read off a portal and lots and lots of words that lost the listener after 30 seconds….
It was, Tonio Fenech never stopped repeating it.
Just ask Saviour Balzan, Kurt Sansone, Herman Grech and Michela Spiteri and a neverending list of other taghnalkollers why they chose to call him a bully and ignore his arguments instead.
The smarter part of the Maltese electorate (no surprises that it’s also the smaller part) knew exactly that these Taghna Lkoll deals are what you’d expect from that bunch.
And this is only the beginning.
What’s scary is that despite all that has happened and is happening still, the Muscat government still has majority support. In this respect at least, the Nationalist governments post 1987 did in fact fail Malta because ignorance remains rampant across all social classes.
Labour will always have the majority support, Ruby, simply because the party does not advocate any form of moral restraint.
Labour Malta is a land where money grabbing, violence, disrespect, cronyism, ignorance, immorality, and unethical practices are reinforced by the PM himself. This is the dark side of Malta.
I have been reflecting on unbelievable actions by the government over the past year and I pictured a monster rearing its frightening maws after three decades of sleep.
Labour is back with a vengeance and it will not stop before it throws Malta into an era worse than those we experienced in the 1980s.
Dr Busuttil and his colleagues at the helm of the PN should realise this fact, accept it and devise a strong strategy to combat this. Dr E Fenech Adami should be their example.
The Electrogas power station will produce 200MW, day and night, but we only need 160MW at night.
Now, I’m not sure I got this right. It would appear that, during the night, we only need 80% of the Electrogas plant potential but the government has committed itself to buy 100% of production. This means that, during the night we will be paying for an unused 20%.
Presumably Electrogas will not even have to produce that extra 20% but will be paid for it anyway. Possibly. Only a careful study of the contract will tell us whether this is true but the government is refusing to let anyone see it.
You are all forgetting that Miriam Dalli, who worked for Con-Rod Mizzi until May, gave the game away on his real plans: MALTA IS GOING TO BECOME A EUROPEAN ENERGY HUB.
We are going to become the powerhouse of the EU, selling electricity and passports.
I doubt whether Miriam Dalli knows what energy hub is.
I proposed a solution earlier.
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2014/10/the-price-of-oil-is-virtually-in-freefall-and-muscat-is-going-for-double-gas/
Now I propose another one.
China should sell its BWSC plant to Electrogas, which will convert it to gas, and honour its contract with the government. China will make a clean profit from a purely speculative transaction.
Problem for China solved.
Problem for Electrogas solved. They get a powerstation.
Problem for Joseph, il-#@ taghna lkoll, solved.
It probably will be the other way around. Don’t be too surprised if the Chinese buy ElectroGas and this could be holding up things as well as a reason why Siemens have not yet invested.
Bear in mind that Gasol signed a major deal with another Chinese energy company earlier this year and they are supposedly the driver in ElectroGas.
Muscat got tangled into a complex web. The ElectroGas Consortium -(Siemens Project Ventures GMBH, SOCAR Trading SA, Gasol Plc and GEM Holdings Ltd) want control and a big return on their huge investment in Enemalta while the Chinese also want control and a huge return on their investment in Enemalta.
Who is going to win? Let the war begin.
Not sure who is going to be the winner but for sure we know the loser – the Maltese people.
So probably what should happen is that the energy market will need to be liberalized with competing energy resellers delivering energy to domestic and commercial end users.
Enemalta will just continue to own the transmission and distribution network and be paid for the service it offers to the energy producers and resellers, i.e. the business model that is used in the liberalised markets.
Enemalta can then go for an IPO and become a public company raising enough money to invest in upgrading the network.
Security of supply is backed up by the interconnector so the energy producers cannot hold Malta to ransom.
This data really shows the blatant frivolity of the strategy and policy of this government.
”… he saw one of the accused, David Spagnol, making a gesture of horns on his head and telling the tourists at St George’s Square “our Prime Minister is a bull”
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20141016/local/our-pm-is-a-bull-hunter-told-tourists-during-protest.539966
Why do I have this unshakeable feeling that there is much lost in translation here? Things such as, to put it mildly, broken promises come to mind.
There’s a lot of soul searching to be done by the switchers.
Mark Sammut is a breath of fresh air on every occasion.
There should be more of him. He’s got just what it takes, and more.
Liema kien il-bank li sellef lill-kumpanija fantazma li holoq il-gvern – madwar 70 miljun – biex thallashom lill-kumpanija fallura (l-Enemalta?)
And now apparently the government of Malta has just bought the Selmun Palace Hotel to bail out Air Malta.
[Daphne – It would make a fabulous official country residence for the prime minister and his wife. Girgenti is a little on the small side, wouldn’t you say. At Selmun, Cyrus and Randolph, Bugs Bunny and the Cheshire Cat, can have their own suite of rooms.]
Why didn’t Air Malta itself come up with the idea of leasing the darned place to third parties?
Why is Joe’s clique thinking of doing it now, given that the concern has been idle for a number of years?
At any rate, who will be the ultimate beneficiary of our tax-money dished out to Air Malta?
It wasn’t because nobody asked.
For those of us with only just a few functioning neurons the writing has been on the wall for quite a few years now.
With this motley bunch of clowns in government, Malta would be driven over the precipice.
However I do not know of anyone who predicted that this would happen in just over eighteen months.
The consensus was that the bust-up would occur sometime during the second MLP legislature towards the end of the decade.
Screwing up a thriving country, that sailed unscathed through a shattering international economic debacle, in a year and a half must be a first in world politics.
Either Muscat and Konrad were themselves conned by their donors/investors or they are deliberately conning the electorate. Either way they should be impeached for electoral fraud.
Cliff edge getting nearer and nearer.
How does the process work legally, Mr Ross?
What’s the procedure?
Could you spell it out?
Who would have to do what in a moment-to-moment scenario?
Considering the interconnector was heavily financed by EU funds, how would the European Commission react if it is under-used?
The interconnector was meant to provide the base load while the BWSC plant was to take the load variability, modulating in steps of 18 megawatts with near zero response time to load variations.
But of course Joseph, Konrad and the crony engineer, who they planted to spy on other engineers at Delimara, know better.
Let’s take stock.
Muscat said in 2012 we need to turn BWSC to gas, we need a new gas plant next to it with storage tanks and we cannot wait till there is an EU gas pipeline cause that will take another six years, cannot be done before 2018 and we cannot wait.
Now two years have passed since then. What is the situation today?
BWSC and the other older plant still run on “cancer” HFO.
Agreements on the gas plan are still being hammered out with Communist China, but we have already sold them part of our grid potential for a pittance.
If final agreement is reached by 2015, there is then an 18 month minimum build time and commissioning but realistically its going to be more like 24 to 30 months. That gets us to July 2017. That is six months away from 2018.
I cannot understand this level of stupidity.
I have been joking about the latest developments at Enemalta, Electrogas and Shanghai Electric, although the matter sounds serious.
Yet, once again, I do not trust the journalism of The Times and The Sunday Times. I refer to the story of 14 October reported here:
http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2014/10/using-its-road-map-the-government-takes-a-wrong-turning-and-hits-a-brick-wall/
This could be another story ‘given’ to them. Am I the only one to notice how all these stories are leaked to The Times, and not to The Malta Independent for instance?
Let me explain.
Joseph Muscat has been drumming the idea of exporting power from Malta, and his friend Miriam Dalli MEP has been harping on the “electricity hub.” They surely have something in mind.
We also heard that Shanghai Electric was prepared to deploy Enemalta employees to other power stations in the Med/Africa region. Now I do not know which power stations those would be, and I do not recall journalists investigating the topic, but let us say they have one or two other power stations in the region, or that they have enough cash to buy others in the near future. If so, those powerstations may need additional capacity during times of the day, which they may be able to get from Malta.
One important factor in these developments is the inter-connector, which everyone seems to mention.
So let us not forget that the PN had promised during the elections to buy electricity on the inter-connector at night, at a low price. Fine. Did they ever tell us how they would use the inter-connector during the day? I cannot remember. A 200MW capacity that sleeps during the day? Wouldn’t that mean that the inter-connector would be at least 50% idle generally? And with a 40MW of excess capacity during the night (taking Mark Anthony Sammut’s numbers above), that percentage will be even less than 50%.
Now I am not technical on this subject, but I would imagine that it is possible to send electricity to the European grid on the inter-connector in the same way that it is possible to buy from that grid.
In international energy markets, electricity is like a commodity that is bought, sold and traded in bundles over electricity networks by intermediary entities.
So I cannot exclude that Enemalta would be in a position to sell its excess power generated and purchased here in Malta during daytime on the international markets, or to its regional power stations and their customers.
Having said so, where is the inter-connector project up to? Has Enemalta announced any agreement with power suppliers from the European grid? At what prices? And what capacities?
The progress on the inter-connector project is still shrouded in total darkness.
In addition to this, if we believe Konrad Mizzi’s other account on the phone from Beijing to The Times, I cannot see why Electrogas should be involved in any way in three-way talks in China about China’s concern that Enemalta should buy the electricity generated by BWSC.
Why should Electrogas be concerned about Enemalta’s deal with China’s BWSC if, according to yet another article carried by The Times in May (remember that Kurt Sansone’s article?), Electrogas has sealed its power deal with Enemalta?
And why would China allow Electrogas, a competitor, around the table where it is negotiating business with the Maltese government, unless of course Electrogas is controlled by Gasol plc which is controlled by Chinese money?
And since I firmly believe that Gasol is China in disguise, then I cannot believe that China and Gasol were not involved since before the elections in Labour’s plan, and they knew all the details of their plan.
So yes, I believe that this is a story invented and leaked to The Times as an excuse to hide the real reasons for the delay in the new gas power plant, divert attention from the pre-electoral promises made by the prime minister, and to possibly develop into an excuse why that plant will NEVER be developed.
If China is seeking any assurances as The Times report of 14 October says, then this can only mean that China wants to exercise some more power on Joseph Muscat now that it has managed to weaken him further through the delay of the Gasol project.
Thinking about it, China’s demands may be related to the use of the inter-connector.
Through its monopoly over the BWSC plant and its hidden interests behind Gasol – whereby China has acquired control over Malta’s power generation – China has Joseph Muscat by the balls. All China has to do is to delay one agreement after the other, each time finding some new excuse, and each time demanding something more from cash-stripped Joseph Muscat. Its either that he gives more concessions, or his balls.
This is a sign of things to come. If anything, the developments reported by The Times show how China now controls Malta and the Maltese government, and I am very surprised that no journalist, and no one in the Opposition, has pointed out this fact as yet.
correciton:
…Wouldn’t that mean that the inter-connector would be at least 50% idle generally? And with a 40MW of excess capacity during the night (taking Mark Anthony Sammut’s numbers above), that percentage will be even MORE than 50%.
One could consider exporting power via the interconnector but only at rock bottom rates, meaning that it would be sold at a great loss.
Switching to the interconnector at night, buying energy at a third of what it costs to produce, made sense when Enemalta was in complete control, enabling it to switch some turbines and save fuel and wear and tear.
That is now history, China owns BWSC and wants to run it at full capacity to maximise profit.
Why do you say “One could consider exporting power via the interconnector but only at rock bottom rates, meaning that it would be sold at a great loss”?
I would imagine that daytime rates are not at rock bottom. Industry, commerce and other consumers throughout Europe have a huge appetite for electricity during daytime, so prices should be competitive.
No one ever gave a toss about the interconnector, Ciccio. Not the Nationalist government, nor the Labour one.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-10-16/local-news/PN-s-controversial-energy-night-tariff-proposal-will-be-considered-by-government-after-all-6736123870
An interconnector can be used either to send or to receive electrical power.
The Chinese company can send electrical power if they find the market for it, but the rate has to be very competitive.
The link shows the electricity rates in Europe.
But we, the local consumers, will have raw deal. First of all, we can’t benefit from cheaper rates during the night because our electricity rate is fixed. Secondly, it will be unfair with us because the consumers on the other end will get our energy cheaper than we do.
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Electricity_and_natural_gas_price_statistics
China is now in a position to dictate terms to a European Union member state, Malta. At its leisure, it calls the PM, whose balls it controls through a series of MOUs (Muscat Owes Us), and the Energy Minister (whose wife works for China while being paid by Malta) to Beijing.
China makes Muscat and Mizzi sign whatever paper it wants.
Meanwhile, China is weakening the Maltese government and Malta itself, exposing it to public ridicule, undermining democracy, creating economic uncertainty, causing waning trust in the government, and lawlessness.
So is Electrogas (or the Chinese ?) going to build a power station which will be producing surplus capacity?
Do we really need a new power station?
Before the 2013 election did the Chinese make an offer which Muscat could not refuse? Next thing the Muscats will be finding a horse’s head in the matrimonial bed.
It seems Michelle Muscat has finally discovered the timer on her washing machine and dish washer and told Konrad about this amazing technological innovation.
http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2014-10-16/local-news/PN-s-controversial-energy-night-tariff-proposal-will-be-considered-by-government-after-all-6736123870
Muscat himself mentioned this idea in 2008 but ridiculed it when it was picked up by Gonzi.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20081111/local/muscats-15-point-plan-to-ease-energy-burden.232670
Wait till Jo gives the go-ahead and lets the Chinese build nuclear power plants at St Andrews.
When wily Mintoff understood that the day of reckoning was closing in on him inexorably he anointed KMB as his hesitant successor with the unenviable task of handling that hot potato taunting him all the while about his lack of enthusiasm to burn his fingers.
Who will be the latter-day KMB to Muscat’s political eclipse?
After the excess generation issues are resolved, possibly exporting through the interconnector, it will be time to take stock of the poor distribution system which needs millions in upgrading.
The irony of it all is that a future Nationalist government will have nightmares to clean up this piling mess. And for their efforts, they will be called traitors of the workers by a Labour opposition and the GWU.
It will be the same story of Malta Drydocks and Marsa Shipbuilding all over again.
A future PN government will have 25 years to clear up the mess.
It has done it before.
It will do it again..
In eight or thirteen years’ time.
Or hopefully 3 as more and more people are finally coming to their senses.
All this spare generation is probably part of Joseph’s ambitious roadmap to make Malta an energy hub supplying electricity to the world and making us the best in Europe.