But even without air conditioners -- the state's biggest summer power user -- the nature of an electroplating business like Superior Chrome makes it a big electricity user, and one that can't easily cut back to relieve the grid.

Mark Tsukuda, whose parents own the shop, said it requires a steady stream of power for the electroplating process and the overhead fluorescent lighting needed to see that the job of restoring antique chrome auto parts is done right.

"As far as electricity goes, there's no way we could cut back unless we cut some hours," Tsukuda said.

Electroplaters aren't the only small businesses struggling to find ways to help the state relieve its power grid after peak demand hit record levels last month. Others -- from restaurants to printers that started trimming power use three years ago to avoid rolling blackouts and high bills -- say it's hard to do much more.

"For a small business like us, we just do what we can, but there's not much we can do," said Edith Sasaki, who co-owns Excel Printing Service in San Jose with her husband.

Wally McGuire, director of the state's "Flex Your Power" conservation campaign, acknowledged that "it's difficult for small businesses" to conserve power, but added that "it's not impossible."

Many small businesses are "over-lit," McGuire said, and others waste power by keeping their doors open with the air conditioners running to encourage customers to come inside. If every California business turned off one of four lights and set thermostats to 78 degrees, it would save 5,000 megawatts, enough to power 3.75 million homes.

"There's an awful lot that can be conserved," McGuire said. "My guess is that a lot of people have drifted back to their old ways."

Like many valley business owners, Sasaki recalls with dread the rolling blackouts of 2000 and 2001 that cut power in patches around the state when California's energy market went haywire. Idled for an hour or more by the outages, businesses lost millions of dollars.

"We'd just sit here in the dark," Sasaki said. "Good thing they didn't last very long or we couldn't have paid our bills."

Since then, the Sasakis have used fans for cooling as much as possible to avoid the power-hungry air conditioner, but they still keep the thermostat set at 72 degrees instead of the 78 suggested by the state. They say the photocopiers at the core of their operation give off so much heat it would be unbearable to set the thermostat any higher at their Willow Glen shop.

"We try to keep it off as much as possible, but we have to have the air conditioning," Sasaki said. "When we've got the copiers going, it heats up real quick, like an oven."

The Sasakis turn off their computer and lights when they aren't needed, but the lights are important to their business.

State officials say California has come a long way toward shoring up its shaky electricity system since the last rolling blackouts. New power plants, energy supply contracts, efficiency measures and anti-gaming market rules should be enough to keep the lights on this summer.

Even so, there's palpable anxiety at the California Independent System Operator, the agency that runs the power grid for Pacific Gas & Electric and other major utilities. California broke a 5-year-old record for peak power demand three consecutive days last month, topping out at 44,360 megawatts July 21. A megawatt powers about 750 average homes.

Grid managers early this year had predicted that level of usage this summer. But they were alarmed when a mild Western warm spell threatened to drive power demand 2,000 megawatts over the July 21 record.

Though they still expected no blackouts, grid officials were troubled to be reaching such levels of energy use before the summer's hottest month, August.

At a recent meeting on the energy situation with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and business groups, Jim Detmers, the system operator's chief operating officer, said the state's energy demand has jumped about 6 percent this year instead of the 3 percent expected earlier. State officials blame the recovering economy and population growth in warm, inland counties.

Schwarzenegger concluded the meeting with a plea for stepped-up energy conservation among consumers and businesses and an executive order for state agencies to try to find further ways to reduce power use.

Fred Aguiar, secretary of the State and Consumer Services Agency, said further savings shouldn't be hard to find in the government's 26 million square feet of office space. The state installed efficient roofing and lighting and took other conservation steps during the power crisis, but it didn't keep track of the savings in the rush to avoid blackouts. A closer look at what has been done should reveal areas where further savings can be achieved, he said.

"We think there's more to do," Aguiar said.

Representatives of major industries who also attended the meeting said they, too, believed they could take simple steps to save the state a lot of power.

Technology giants such as Cisco Systems, with 13,200 Santa Clara County employees, can deliver big savings to the grid through such modest measures. As it has since the state energy crisis, Cisco routinely reminds its San Jose employees to turn off computer monitors and lights when not in use, said spokeswoman Heather Goodwin. Motion sensors turn off lights in areas not in use.

When grid officials call for conservation, Cisco shuts off power to unessential areas such as fountains, and the lighting and air conditioning in stairwells and lobbies, Goodwin said.

"We do our active part of just encouraging energy-conservation efforts across the board," Goodwin said.

Smaller businesses, however, say it's hard to find further savings without cutting into core operations.

Henry's Hi-Life steakhouse, for instance, turns off its air conditioning while the downtown San Jose restaurant is closed between lunch and dinner, which coincides with the critical afternoon peak-power-demand period. Employees turn off outside lighting, too.

But beyond that, the biggest power user is the walk-in food and beverage cooler -- not something a restaurant can reasonably be expected to turn down.

"We turn off our outside neons, any kind of outside electricity we don't need during the daytime," bartender James Dill said. "We figure a little bit here and there. But our refrigeration units run all the time. There's not much we can do about that."