Costumers were asked to cut energy usage by 10 percent, while large companies switched to power generators. Smaller businesses, however, did not have that luxury. Many stores and similar buildings had to close, while they were out of power, which was awful for business. Some places lost up to a day's worth of sales during the week (NYT). Factories and mines were also forced to close because of the power problems. The closing of these factories lead to credit ratings downgrade for South Africa (BBC). Peter Attard Montalto said "Eskom has basically no emergency capacity, which means it cannot absorb any hits on random events." Therefore, the company's inability to deal with unexpected issues had a serious impact on their customer's electricity.
The capacity deficit was at its peak on March 6th, which was about 3,500 megawatts. That was the worst it had been since blackouts in 2008. On the same day, Eskom tweeted "As we experience load-shedding, customers can expect two to four hours of power outages at a time." (BBC). The rolling blackouts locally caused a problem for residents, businesses, and mines across the countries, which affected South Africa's economy, ability to produce, and world status as the powerhouse of Africa. (NYT) The 2014 blackouts were the worst Eskom has seen since the blackouts of 2008, which were caused by the government's refusal to realize that the energy company could not keep up with South Africa's growing population and industry. "Because South Africa is an engine of growth for the region, a slowdown here would also affect its neighbors, undermining global efforts to reduce poverty and damaging South Africa's own drive to slash its woeful unemployment rate of 25.5%," the New York Times stated in 2008. It was said in 1998, that there would be major power outages in 2007 if capacity was not increased, due to the fact that after the African National Congress came to power in 1994, the population doubled (BBC).
