The "saver switch" is not as bad as it sound. In residential uses it hooks up only to the central AC where the compressors can be turned off for up to fifteen minutes at a time. It is debatable how much electricity this saves since the AC compressor will make up for lost time once it starts again. People told me that it gets a bit muggy inside when the saver switch is working.
3M uses a lot but the big users here are the iron range taconite processing (lower grade iron ore processed to high iron content pellets) and a very large scrap steel "mini-mill" on the Mississippi near St. Paul. All can be shut down during heat waves making the Minnesota grid quite robust but it can be stretched only so far. Taconite for new domestic steel is way down and the scrap mini mill demand is way down. They make rebar and basic structural steel, I beams and such but the domestic demand for these is way down. Increasingly, local scrap steel is shredded, cubed and sent via barge to the Gulf of Mexico and then other countries. Mini-mills make money by converting scrap steel into rebars and common structural steel. Good products but they are new construction related. Mini-mills use electric arc furnaces which use a lot of electricity.
The point of this is that as the region grows, even in a downturn electricity demand will increase and we are now eating up the slack capacity. In the Twin Cities we have some of what I would can "we played hard to get and weren't being got economic (construction) activity. Primo construction locations held back by final "sprouting" but this is only the primo stuff. Figure electricity has a 500 mile "leash" before you get excessive line losses.
BTW: The so-called "server farms" are not big electrical users but electrical demand is highest during peak electrical demand. I used to work in the high end mainframe field and the "big irons" were water cooled! Server stacks were air cooled and didn't get that got. Basically a "server stack" can be up to fifty high end laptop "guts" sharing a single display and mouse. There are banks of what are basically desktop big hard drives and "jukeboxes" full of double sided "blu-ray" type data disks with more mundane "paperwork".
The point is that the established data centers are using less energy. If you build a modern data center from scratch that will suck up a lot of juice but that is a minor cost. Minnesota has not had the blackouts/brownouts they have had on the West Coast.
BTW: Google use the 3M model to develop Google. I have been leading a so far lame effort to have Google establish a facility on the Twin Cities 3M corporate campus.
Cross posted at my http://fourfiftygas.com (why retype?
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