ESG PRESS RELEASE

Re POWER STATION 30/09/14

 The ESG wishes to take up an important issue raised during a GBC interview with Deputy Chief Minister, Dr. Joseph Garcia recently, regarding the expected completion of the next state of the art, compliant, power station for Gibraltar.

The group has lobbied for the past 14 years for such a facility and it regrets that in spite of assurances given repeatedly by the present Government:  that a new station would, in fact, be completed within the same time frame as the previous GSD project, that we now hear this is not going to happen.

The Department of the Environment is now spending money on a year long campaign to reduce power use, this unfortunately won’t move the new power station along, reduce pollution from the ageing power stations or indeed reduce energy use given that all the new government housing will now come on line before the new power station is completed. Despite this campaign the energy demand in Gibraltar will unfortunately substantially increase in the next few months and we can therefore expect more pollution and noise from our ageing power stations.

The wisdom of placing further load on our aged infrastructure, and more demand on an obsolete power generation infrastructure, does not bode well for the future.