Energy celebrates its first milestone in a bid to defeat Malta’s renewable energy inertia

The subject of energy sustainability is certainly an area that Malta can do much more and accomplish better results. Our island presents many challenges but certainly ample opportunities that must be explored to the fullest.

MaltaEnergy Ltd, a partnership between the Malta Chamber of SMEs and the Water Services Corporation, was set up exactly for this reason. The company can now announce its first successful milestones and is an example of how targets can be met in line with best practices.

The company invested a lot of time and effort to make sure that the projects being offered would involve as many enterprises as possible from procurement stage, while respecting EU directives. This way of doing public procurement is the best practice which moves away from the common practice of demanding to deal with just one entity that can take up all the work. It gives SME structures the direct opportunity to participate and provide quality projects. The final project will involve putting specific rooftops to good use and generate renewable energy.

The tender has now been awarded and is nearing implementation stage. A total of five different enterprises will take up the project with full ownership and responsibility, and with no cost or risk to government. In return, the operators will get a return from the energy generated and business stability for 20 years, strengthening our green economy and green jobs. The project will ultimately provide better grid stability and put us in a better position to cater for foreseen increased requirements our country will have on renewables.

MaltaEnergy Ltd is confident that these models are best practices for other public entities to follow and will pave the way for other projects of this sort.

If future projects are issued on this model, Malta will be in a much better position to reach and maybe exceed its renewable energy targets. In this case, the project capacity has doubled due to more efficient use of space, from 1 MW as originally estimated, to 2MW as proposed by the winning bidders.

It is estimated that the project will generate circa 3 million kilowatts of clean energy annually.