Minister for Energy
and Water Management Joe Mizzi said that Utilities must strive to improve their energy efficiencies by optimizing current
practices, investing in greener technology and of course invest in renewable
energy.
He said that in view of this, the Water Services
Corporation has embarked on a project, in conjunction with the Energy and Water
Agency for the construction of a photovoltaic farm on one of its largest
reservoirs in Fiddien, Rabat, and two more large scales PV projects are now in
the pipeline.
Whilst addressing the European Benchmarking Cooperation
workshop, which this year is being hosted in Malta, Minister Mizzi said that
the WSC has continuously invested to reduce the energy requirements for
desalination through the introduction of energy recovery systems, variable
frequency drives, and more efficient processes and machinery.
The EBC is an
industry-based initiative for water and waste water services. Their mission is
to facilitate water and waste water utilities in the continuous process of
improving, innovating and raising transparency.
“We are proud that EBC has accepted our invitation to host
this year’s event, specifically in the smallest Member State of the European
Union,” Minister Mizzi said.
He said that the supply of potable water has always been a
problem for the Maltese Islands due to our semi-dry climate and small
geographical size. Since the sixteenth century, Malta resorted to storage of
rain water and exploitation of the islands’ limited natural springs and ground
water aquifers to survive. Some of these systems were ground-breaking at the
time and now form part of our vast cultural heritage. As the population grew
and demand on water resources spiralled, Malta resorted to desalination to be
able to meet the demand and the quality requirements for safe drinking water.
The Maltese Government, has over the past years, sought to
improve the quality of the service provided by the Water Services Corporation
(WSC).
Minister Mizzi mentioned the investment and upgrading of
our infrastructure and methodologies and the setting of targets, as well as the
continuous assessment of their performance.
“Public entities in Malta”, he said, “including the WSC,
are carefully assessed through the routine reporting of a number of KPIs. These
are used by the individual institutions to follow up on their performance. This
will ascertain that all the investment made does not go to waste but rather,
the Maltese people and the Maltese economy in general keep on benefitting from
the improvements made over the years.”
Minister Mizzi added that the European Benchmarking
Cooperation is of great support to Malta and the WSC. “It gives us the unique
opportunity to measure ourselves, from the context of a small nation, with
other much larger countries having a substantial number of smaller utilities or
others with few but larger ones. Notwithstanding the continuous investment
required to maintain high quality standards, this is not enough. In today’s
cosmopolitan society utility companies are not just responsible to provide
clean drinking water and treating waste water safely but must be able to do
this with minimal impact on the environment.”
“Challenges such as population growth, water scarcity,
climate change, depletion of natural resources and water security, emerging
pollutants, carbon footprints and the move towards a more circular economy
should be at the forefront of our priorities. Society in general has high
expectations from utilities and thus we have a moral obligation to face them, and
believe me this is the right thing to do for our environment, our societies and
ultimately ourselves,” Minister Mizzi concluded.
