"The Rosenfeld" Named After California’s Godfather of Energy Efficiency

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2010/03/09/the-rosenfeld-unit-of-energy-efficiency/

“The Rosenfeld” Named After California’s Godfather of Energy Efficiency
March 09, 2010
Julie Chao

Pioneering French physicists Marie and Pierre Curie have the curie, a unit of radioactivity, named after them. Renowned inventor Nikola Tesla is honored with the tesla, which measures a magnetic field. And now, the Rosenfeld, proposed as a unit for electricity savings, will be named after the man seen by many people as the godfather of energy efficiency, Arthur Rosenfeld.

“In keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question,” a group of scientists propose today in a refereed article in Environmental Research Letters to define the Rosenfeld as electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year, the amount needed to replace the annual generation of a 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant.

That definition, explains lead author Jonathan Koomey, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist and consulting professor at Stanford University who was once a graduate student of Rosenfeld’s, is classic Rosenfeld. “Power plants are what Art uses most often to explain to policy makers how much electricity can be saved by efficiency investments,” Koomey said.

With a decades-long career in energy analysis and standards, Rosenfeld is often credited with being personally responsible for billions of dollars in energy savings. He started his career at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab in the 1950s as a physicist in the Nobel Prize-winning particle physics group of Luis Alvarez. However, in 1974, he decided to switch his focus to energy and the environment. He founded the Center for Building Science at Berkeley Lab in 1975, where a broad range of energy efficiency standards and technologies were developed over the next 20 years.

Having just completed two five-year terms on the California Energy Commission, Rosenfeld will be returning to Berkeley Lab this spring to continue championing scientific solutions for society’s most urgent environmental problems.

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Indeed, he already has a term named after him: the “Rosenfeld effect” explains why California’s per capital electricity usage has remained flat since the mid-1970s while U.S. usage has climbed steadily and is now 50 percent higher than it was 40 years ago. Low-emissivity “smart windows,” electronic ballasts that led to compact fluorescent lamps and energy standards for appliances and buildings were Berkeley Lab innovations that made the Rosenfeld effect possible. The term has been popularized by U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, who has called Rosenfeld a hero of his.

He is also behind “Rosenfeld’s Law,” which states that the amount of energy required to produce one dollar of economic output has decreased by about 1 percent per year since 1845.

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