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EL6 power usage optimisation on Intel Sandy & Ivy Bridge

So you finally bought that fancy new laptop with a SandyBridge or IvyBridge chip, but the power usage goes through the roof when you use it on Linux? Well, there are a couple of things you could do:

1. Enable some nice features such as a lower power usage state capability of the Intel GPU (if you use the integrated Intel 3000/4000), frame buffer compression and optionally down-clock the LVDS refresh rate. Also, you can force PCI-Express to enable "ActiveState Power Management" which can save further power - just append the following to the kernel command line (in /boot/grub/grub.conf):
i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 i915.i915_enable_fbc=1 i915.lvds_downclock=1 pcie_aspm=force


2. Install and tweak tuned. Tuned is a Fedora utility responsible for tuning your system's power settings.
yum install tuned
service tuned start
service ktune start
tuned-adm profile laptop-battery-powersave


If you want to get even more serious about power saving, then the powertop program is very useful, too. For a graphical tool focused on power management have a look at Jupiter.
Feel free to play around with the settings and read the man pages for more information.
Be careful as some of these settings may cause some issues or instabilities. Use at your own risk.