Increasing Malta's Energy Independence

Most of us on this island have lived through the strangest energy crisis of all time: Europe’s energy bills shot up, ours… didn’t. In light of the war in Ukraine, while families across the EU were dimming lights and turning down thermostats, our ARMS bills stayed almost eerily flat. That wasn’t a miracle of unprecedented Maltese efficiency. The government was quietly paying the difference between global energy prices and our fixed tariffs.

In 2022 alone, energy support is estimated to have cost around four hundred million euro, roughly 2.5% of Malta’s GDP. The bill has eased since then but Malta is still spending a chunky share of its economy each year just to keep electricity prices where they are. Over a few years, that adds up to billions spent not on changing how we produce energy, but on hiding its true price.

And Brussels has noticed. In recent assessments, the European Commission has repeatedly warned that blanket energy subsidies should be phased out and replaced with more targeted help, because they blunt the incentive to save energy and invest in renewables.

Seen against that background, this year’s talk of offshore wind and a second interconnector is more than a feel-good green paragraph. It is an attempt to shift Malta away from permanent crisis subsidies and towards an energy system that is cleaner, more secure, and more our own.

Where do we stand today?

Today, Malta’s electricity system rests on three very clear pillars. In 2024, 58% of our electricity supply came from net generation at the Delimara power station complex, running mostly on imported natural gas. Another 31% flowed in through the Malta–Sicily interconnector, effectively plugging us into Italy’s grid. The remaining 11% was generated from renewables, most of which was solar power from rooftop PV panels and a small number of solar farms. In other words, close to nine out of every ten units of electricity we consume still depend on energy coming from somewhere else, either as fuel for our turbines or as electrons over the cable. 

Zooming out beyond just electricity, renewables made up around 15% of Malta’s gross final energy consumption in 2023 (which would include transport fuel), compared with an EU average of almost 25%: progress for our island, but still well behind the rest of Europe.

Solar on our roofs: progress with limits

If you climb onto almost any high roof in Malta or Gozo, you can literally see the energy transition laid out in front of you. Gone are the days where solar panels were an odd curiosity. Today, those black rectangles are part of the local skyline. We now have just under 35,000 PV systems installed.

That leap, driven by grants and long-term feed-in or export tariffs, has turned us from an almost zero-renewables outlier into a country where solar genuinely matters, especially on bright afternoons when panels quietly shave a chunk off national demand.

But solar has hard limits. Not every roof is structurally sound, south-facing or free from shade. In many neighbourhoods, you can do everything right, only for a neighbour to knock down their house, build a block of flats and plunge your panels into permanent shadow. Useful as it is, rooftop PV on its own will never get us to anything close to 80% or 90% clean electricity. It’s a crucial layer, but not the whole cake.

Wind: the project that never happened and the one that might

Wind is not new to Malta’s energy imagination. 

In 2006, official studies identified Sikka l-Bajda, a shallow reef off Mellieħa, as a promising site for an offshore wind farm. There were proper wind-measurement masts, environmental studies and costings. Then the drawbacks piled up: concerns about bird migration and views from the coast, and deep-water technology that was still too expensive for Malta’s seabed. By the mid-2010s, the idea of big Maltese wind farms had appeared dead in the water and progress since then has come from the sun, not the wind.

What has changed recently is both the technology and the structure of the plan. Floating wind is now moving from experiment to commercial scale  and Malta is currently tendering a 300 MW floating offshore wind farm in its Exclusive Economic Zone, more than 12 nautical miles offshore. One private operator will get a long-term Contract for Difference to design, build and run the farm, while the state keeps control of the offshore substation and export cable. Three consortia have already applied, but no winner or commissioning date has been announced yet, and the Budget’s “offshore wind studies” are feeding into this process by checking conditions at sea and how the project would plug into the grid.

For a tiny island, the potential prize is anything but symbolic. Malta’s peak electricity demand typically sits in the 500–600 MW range, with the existing Malta–Sicily interconnector able to carry 200 MW. A 300 MW floating wind farm running in decent Mediterranean winds would not cover all our needs all the time. After all, wind is variable. But over a year, it could generate electricity on the same order of magnitude as what we currently draw through the interconnector. In other words, it’s the difference between having one big leg of the system that depends entirely on imported gas and cables, and having a second, home-grown leg anchored in our own sea. It would not cut us off from the rest of the world, but it would tilt the balance towards more energy made here, and less exposure to gas cargoes and Italian spot prices.

The second interconnector: dependence or backbone?

If we are talking about energy “independence”, a second interconnector sounds counter-intuitive. Another cable to Sicily? Isn’t that more dependence, not less?

In 2015, the first Malta–Sicily link became operational. It connected us to the European grid for the first time and helped us ditch heavy fuel oil more quickly. It also created a new vulnerability: when it failed in 2019, we felt it in a wave of power cuts.

The second interconnector, announced in 2021 and now under construction, is meant to be both twin and backup. It’s a high-voltage subsea cable between Ragusa and Magħtab, rated at around 225 MW, well over a third of our typical peak demand. Work is under way on both sides of the channel, and completion is currently targeted for around 2026, turning that extra capacity into a crucial safety valve for a more renewable-heavy system.

In a world with big offshore wind and more solar, that extra link becomes less an umbilical cord and more a safety net. When it is very windy and sunny, Malta could export surplus power to Italy instead of switching off turbines. When it is calm, we can import instead of over-relying on gas. If one cable fails, the other plus local generation keep the system alive. For a grid as tiny as ours, stronger connection to a decarbonising European system is what will allow us to run on more renewables without constantly flirting with blackouts.

A realistic version of “energy independence”

Total energy independence which, in effect, means never importing a single kilowatt, is not realistic for Malta. We are a small, open island that will always buy fuel and technology from abroad. But we can change the balance.

Over the next 10–15 years, a realistic target for Malta would be to push domestic renewables towards 60–70% of our electricity, with the remaining 30–40% shared between gas and interconnector imports used mainly as backup rather than as the backbone of the system. Our bills depend more on the wind and sun over our waters and less on what happens in Moscow or Brussels.

Getting close to that model over the next decade would mean finishing the job on rooftop and public-sector solar, actually delivering (at least) one large floating wind farm, and pairing both with serious storage, a stronger grid and those two interconnectors. It also means using less energy per person through better buildings, more efficient cooling and electrified transport.

Compared to a decade ago, when the big story was a new gas plant and a single cable, this year’s Budget nudges the conversation in a different direction. It does not magically free us from subsidies, or guarantee that offshore wind will finally happen. But it does, for the first time in a long time, treat our sea and sun as the potential backbone of the system rather than decorative add-ons, a shift that is worth watching with cautious, informed curiosity.

Sources

• NSO (2025), Electricity Supply: 2024, National Statistics Office, Valletta.

• NSO (2025), Renewable Energy from Photovoltaic Panels (PVs): 2024, National Statistics Office, Valletta.

• NSO (2025), Renewable energy share in the total final energy consumption (Indicator 7.2.1), National Statistics Office, Valletta.

• Eurostat (2025), Renewable energy statistics, Eurostat Statistics Explained, Luxembourg.

• Interconnect Malta (2025), Offshore Renewable Energy Project, Interconnect Malta Ltd, Valletta.

• Interconnect Malta (2025), Projects – Second Electrical Interconnector, Interconnect Malta Ltd, Valletta.

• IMF (2023), Malta: Selected Issues, International Monetary Fund, Washington DC.

• Central Bank of Malta (2024), The Economic Effects of the Fixed Energy Price Policy, Research Bulletin 2024, Central Bank of Malta, Valletta.