Govt: Power outages 'a national emergency'

2008-01-31 09:46

Pretoria - Government considers the "unprecedented and unplanned" outages affecting South Africans across the country as a national emergency, the Public Enterprises Minister, Alec Erwin, said on Friday.

"It is clear that we are running our power system at utilisation levels that are overstretching maintenance and if we do not stabilize this we could drive our system into higher level of stress... this we can not do," he said.

He said the next two years would be critical, adding energy saving was critical.

"It is also critical to stress that the growth of South Africa's economy at the current healthy levels can continue if we change our behaviour and become more energy efficient," Erwin said.

Erwin added government had to share the blame for the current crisis, saying the country was becoming a victim of its own success with electricity demand growing faster than expected.

"The president has accepted that this government got its timing wrong," he said.

- SAPA