The father of energy efficiency
Arthur Rosenfeld’s research revolutionized the simple act of turning off the lights
Arthur Rosenfeld was an experimental physicist who spent three decades studying subatomic particles.
It was only during the oil crisis of the mid-1970s that Rosenfeld turned to the field of energy efficiency, viewing it as a way for the United States to avoid future oil-embargo threats from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
While preparing to go home one Friday night in November 1973, dreading the seemingly inevitable half-hour wait at the gas pump, he turned off his office lights — a habit he developed as a child during the Depression — and began calculating the energy savings that his office would achieve if everyone else did the same.
Hunting for light switches on his 20-office floor, searching behind filing cabinets and book cases, he decided his laboratory “should do something about conservation,” as he later put it.
Rosenfeld began leading research efforts to calculate the savings of relatively simple acts such as turning off the lights —100 gallons of natural gas saved per weekend at his office alone, he calculated — and getting rid of inefficient refrigerators and home appliances.
At a meeting with California Gov. Jerry Brown a few years later, Rosenfeld explained that if the state prohibited the most inefficient refrigerators, it could avoid building a controversial power plant known as Sundesert. Energy conservation, as Rosenfeld saw it, was easier, cheaper and altogether smarter than building new power plants.
Brown agreed, and in 1977, drawing from Rosenfeld’s research, he enacted what are considered to be the country’s first efficiency requirements for appliances. The standards, set initially only for refrigerators and freezers, were followed one year later by an energy-efficient building code that aimed to reduce residential energy usage by 80 per cent.
Federal regulations established similar standards for home appliances in 1987.
At the same time, Rosenfeld and a team of researchers at Berkeley’s Center for Building Science developed several quietly revolutionary technologies: electronic ballasts that helped popularize the compact fluorescent lamp, an energy-efficient light bulb; a coating for window glass that allows homes to trap heat in the winter and keep it out in the summer; computer programs that analyze buildings’ energy usage; and, most recently, a reflective roof design that aids with cooling.
In an autobiographical 1999 paper, Rosenfeld estimated that products developed at the centre resulted in consumer saving of $30 billion each year. “In terms of pollution control,” he wrote, “this is the equivalent to displacing approximately 100 million cars.”
The efficiency standards that resulted from his research had a similarly striking effect. In what efficiency advocates and some scientists hail as “the Rosenfeld effect,” per capita energy usage in California has hardly grown since the mid-1970s — despite a seemingly endless proliferation of household gadgets, appliances and electricity-hogging televisions.
In the United States as a whole, per capita energy usage has more than doubled.
Rosenfeld died Jan. 27 at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 90. The cause was complications from pneumonia, said a daughter, Anne Hansen.
Rosenfeld received the Energy Department’s Enrico Fermi Award in 2006 and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama in 2013.
He was also honoured by 54 of his colleagues, who in 2010 co-authored a paper that proposed a new unit of measurement equivalent to the amount of energy produced by a 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant each year. It would, the paper promised, be a convenient way to perform back-of-the-envelope calculations about the elimination of proposed power plants.
The scientists proposed that it be called the Rosenfeld.