Broadening efforts to rein in California's power crisis, regulators ordered that restraints on prices be applied at all hours and extended them to 10 other Western states.

To many experts, the woes of California's natural gas market are as profound as those of its electricity market.

One of California's struggling utility companies accused the El Paso Corporation yesterday of artificially inflating the price of natural gas in the state by $3.7 billion over the last year by using its partial control of a major pipeline to curtail the flow of gas.

Duke Energy, a power-generating company accused of overcharging customers millions of dollars during California's year-old energy crisis, has secretly offered Gov. Gray Davis a deal that it hopes will solve its legal problems while helping to calm the state's chaotic electricity markets.

Pacific Gas and Electric, the giant California utility, may have just made one of the largest bankruptcy filings in history, but it has been a banner year for the rest of its parent company, the PG&E Corporation.

A novel plan by federal regulators to control California's runaway electricity prices is a messy, politically motivated compromise that may offer some relief to consumers but will do little to fix the state's dysfunctional energy market, analysts said.

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company, California's largest investor-owned utility, filed for bankruptcy protection today, declaring that politicians and regulators had not moved quickly enough to resolve an energy crisis that has caused periodic rolling blackouts and is costing the state billions of dollars.