Lights out: Power cuts threaten Silicon Valley

The Independent System Operator, which manages the state's transmission grid, ordered 60 to 90 minute power cuts to some 200,000 customers. Further cuts are feared for today.

One victim of the outage was Sun Microsystems who was forced to postpone a press conference and rumours abound that Apple's Cupertino offices were also affected.

California governor Gray Davis signed an emergency order to allow the State to buy power, allowing the state to appropriate funds to keep power flowing for the next week to 10 days.

California's energy companies are in chaos following deregulation in 1996, with the two major power companies nearly bankrupt. Both have been forced to buy expensive power on the spot market, but the deregulation laws forbid them from passing these charges on to customers.

However, the blackouts have been widely attributed to the unusually cold winter and a lack of supply capacity. The state has not built a major new power station in ten years, despite a booming economy and strong population growth.