Government considers the "unprecedented and unplanned" outages affecting South Africans across the country as a national emergency, 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 stabilise this we could drive our system into higher levels of stress... this we can not do," he said.

Erwin, speaking at media briefing in Pretoria, said the next two years would be 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.

Government would implement an electricity rationing programme as a "quick hit" solution to address the current power blackouts, said Minerals and Energy Minister Buyelwa Sonjica. "We have discussed how quotas will be allocated, who will be exempt from the programme, what incentives and penalties will be in place, when it will start and what legislative enablers we need to have in place for the programme to work," Sonjica said.

There is a plan to replace incandescent light in the country's households with compact fluorescent lights which government believes would save 800MW, and a plan to install one million solar water heaters over the next three years which will save around 650MW.

Government also wants to change behaviour by setting building standards geared towards energy efficient behaviour. It plans to implement smart metering for residential areas which will enable the municipalities and Eskom to remotely manage customer loads.

Other plans include converting traffic lights and public lights, switching from electricity to liquefied petroleum gas, and to compel hospitals to use solar power for water heating.