CYPRUS EDITORIAL: Too many cooks spoil the energy broth

1337 views
1 min read

.

One can only wonder how the government machine works in Cyprus when everything comes to a halt caused by a multitude of strikes (state doctors, ports, electricity authority), most of the time over pay without discussing productivity issues and our depreciating competitiveness.


 

But the question is also a rhetorical one, addressed to the politicians (elected and appointed), who cannot fathom the importance of doing something right, let alone coming up with a strategy and implementing it.

 

In between the strikes this week, members of parliament were also pondering over what went wrong with legislation to encourage the wider use of electric vehicles (and subsequent reduction of emissions), only to discover that a clause introduced aeons ago, foresaw that the then electric bubbles should not be allowed on the highway, as they were too slow.

 

This goes to show that in their haste to pass a piece of legislation, to conform with “EU regulations” which were so often demonised, both the ministry technocrats and the deputies missed this crucial parameter.

 

As a result, electric vehicles have no place on Cyprus roads and there seems to be no strategy on how to deal with the issue.

 

One department often blames the other, in a war of territorial rights, and nothing gets done until someone sits down and reads the proposed legal framework.

 

But technocrats, it should be said, do their work as they are told, very often by people who have no idea, or in the even grander vision of things, have no strategy or national policy.

 

The entire energy sector, that encompasses not only producing and transmitting energy, but also using energy, is on automatic pilot, with old documents and plans updated, obsolete terms deleted, and new ones added.

 

That’s why there is no national strategy on anything energy-related, with the exception being the high-profile drilling for natural gas, which experts do not see becoming commercial in this lifetime.

 

Far away islands, with less infrastructure and much smaller government machines, such as Costa Rica, decades ago adopted national strategies, such as the mandatory conversion of all public street lighting to solar-powered.

 

If we don’t know what we have and who is doing what, then how do we expect to have a national strategy on energy, to begin with?

 

Where will the incentives come from and when will people wake up to the reality that we are far behind the rest of the EU on such matters.

 

Perhaps selling passports-for-investments was more of a priority, but that was short-lived and coming to an end. Where we go next is anybody’s idea.