The events affected several electronics companies, reportedly including Broadcom, Sun, among others.

According to the Associated Press, the California Independent System Operator ordered the state's utilities to implement rolling blackouts for about 500,000 homes and businesses in the northern and southern part of the state.

The outages were scheduled to last up to an hour, according to the Associated Press.

The ISO declared a Stage 3 alert, due to increased demand for electricity and the loss of 1,400 megawatts because of a transformer fire at a Southern California plant. It also said 12,000 megawatts were unavailable because of idled plants.

Traffic lights and computer screens went dark in Beverly Hills, Silicon Valley, San Diego, and other communities.

The events are ominous signs for the state and its electronics industry. In fact, the state's electricity crisis is causing some chip makers with wafer fabs and related facilities in the state to re-examine their manufacturing strategies.

If California's power problems keep growing, a sizable portion of U.S. chip-manufacturing capacity could be threatened, according to wafer fab statistics.

In fact, there are some 102 wafer fabs of all sizes in California, which accounted for 23% of the chip-processing capacity in the United States in 2000, according to Strategic Marketing Associates Inc. in Santa Cruz, Calif. California is currently the second ranked state in terms of fab capacity, behind Texas, and it accounted for 4% of the world's fab capacity last year.

In the middle of January, central and northern Californiaregions--including jam-packed Silicon Valley--were hit by two days of rolling blacks when the state's power companies attempted to avoid uncontrolled power outages in the energy crisis. The series of temporary blackouts stopped work at businesses, disrupted technical services, and caused million of dollars in losses at the state's electronics companies, according to some estimates.

Advanced Micro Devices, Integrated Device Technology, Linear Technology, and LSI Logic were hit by those rolling blackouts. Others chip makers--such as Agilent, Cypress, Intel, and NEC--said they were not impacted by the power outages.

Exasperated over the electrical power situation, Intel Corp. CEO Craig Barrett recently called California a "third-world country." He also warned that Intel will not build another facility in the state until the power crisis is resolved.