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SACRAMENTO – California’s power managers working on the state’s fragile electricity grid Friday ordered service cut to voluntary customers in Southern California as they lost power imports from Arizona and the Northwest. 

The state was in a Stage 3 alert for the 11th straight day, but managers said blackouts were unlikely. 

“We still anticipate being able to avoid rotating blackouts; however, conservation is even more critical,” said Stephanie McCorkle, spokeswoman for the California Independent System Operator. 

At one minute before midnight Thursday, the ISO had lifted the Stage 3 alert for the first time in nearly two weeks. That alert means power reserves are so low that there is a good chance of blackouts. 

However, the ISO reinstated the Stage 3 at 4:32 a.m. PST, when a 260-megawatt Northern California power plant went down. The ISO said the alert would run through midnight Friday. 

A total of 1,200 Southern California customers who have been paying lower rates in return for allowing their power to be cut during shortages were ordered to shut off electricity until 4:15 a.m. Friday, McCorkle said. 

In addition to the plant being down, the state had imports from Arizona and the Northwest cut by a total of about 2,200 megawatts, she said. 

A Stage 3 alert means power reserves are below 1.5 percent, Stage 2 is below 5 percent and Stage 1 is below 7 percent. 

Energy managers on Thursday had suggested they might even be able to go to a Stage 1 alert later Friday, in which people are simply advised to conserve energy, and praised the state’s consumers. 

“California’s conservation efforts played an important role in the ISO’s ability to keep the lights on this week,” the ISO, which controls most of the state’s power grid, said in a statement. 

On Thursday, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan warned that if the state’s energy crisis isn’t resolved soon, it could cause a ripple effect throughout the U.S. economy that could undermine the nation’s decade-long expansion. 

“It’s scarcely credible that you can have a major economic problem in California which does not feed to the rest of the 49 states,” Greenspan said in congressional testimony, adding that the crisis could reduce investment in the West, which in turn could shake consumer confidence. 

He called the situation “a significant problem that this country is going to have to address, and ... rather quickly.” 

System operators, meanwhile, said as many as 1,000 megawatts of electricity — enough to power one million homes — were saved each day this week through conservation. 

Last week, in the midst of a record 10 straight days of Stage 3 alerts, power had to be shut off to hundreds of thousands of users across central and northern California on two consecutive days. 

Many more large users, those who had signed agreements to shut off their power during a shortage in exchange for lower rates, also lost electricity for hours at a time. Representatives of many of them were in San Francisco on Friday to lobby the state Public Utilities Commission to let them out of those agreements. 

“What we are stuck with is a program that was put together prior to deregulation that makes no sense now,” said Phillip L. Doolittle, vice president for finance and administration at the University of Redlands. The school has amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties by ignoring the agreement and keeping its electricity on to avoid canceling classes. 

As Friday began, the biggest threat of the day to most power users appeared to be a heavy winter storm that brought driving rain to San Francisco and several inches of snow to the Sierra Nevada. It knocked out power to more than 40,000 users in Sonoma and Marin counties and parts of the Sierra foothills as it lumbered toward Southern California. 

Lawmakers prepared to work through the weekend to find a long-term solution to the crisis. 

Occupying their attention was a plan under which California would issue bonds to cover the multibillion-dollar debts of its two biggest electric utilities and make the utilities’ customers pay the money back over 10 years. 

One of the state’s most prominent consumer activists immediately denounced the plan as a bailout and promised to lead a voter initiative campaign against it. 

“If that’s what they plan to do, they’ll have to contend with a ratepayer revolt at the ballot box in 2002,” said Harvey Rosenfield of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights. 

“It’s not a bailout,” said Gov. Gray Davis, who supports the proposal. “It accomplishes two purposes: It provides the funding to revitalize the utilities, but it lets ratepayers know they will gain as the utilities gain.” 

Under the proposal, the state would issue revenue bonds that Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers would pay back through recently approved rate increases of 9 percent for residential customers and 7 to 15 percent for businesses that would be kept in force for 10 years. 

In exchange, California would be granted long-term options allowing the state to buy low-priced stock in the utilities. If the price goes up, the state could sell the stock and use the profits to help pay off the bonds. 

The utilities have declined to comment on the proposal. 

Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys, said the plan wouldn’t require spending taxpayer money, but Rosenfield complained that it would be financed through “hidden charges on people’s utility bills.” 

“They’re desperately looking for a way to make it look as if the rate payers are going to get something in exchange for giving the utilities $12 billion to bail them out for the mistakes they’ve made under deregulation,” he said.