Energy Saving News
Watts, Volts, Amps, Joules and now the Rosenfeld?
Art Rosenfeld's has been called the father of energy saving and efficiency and now his name is being suggested as a term for a new energy measurement unit - the Rosenfeld, but more on that shortly, who is Art Rosenfeld?
Apparently back during an oil crisis in 1973, on a Friday, Rosenfeld tried to save electricity by turning off the lights of his office mates -- but couldn't find the switches. They were hidden by bookcases, file cabinets and posters.
"After 20 minutes of uncovering light switches in 19 offices (thereby saving 100 gallons of natural gas that weekend), I decided that we should do something about conservation," Rosenfield recalls.
That started him off on a path that he has been traveling ever since. As a particle physicist Rosenfeld started to make his point regarding energy saving to politicians, power-industry moguls, policy makers, engineers and average citizens - with his best line: "The cheapest energy is what you don't use."
To honour Rosenfeld UC Davis, the University of California, will host a full day of programs and events with the newsworthy event being the proposal of a new unit of measurement - the Rosenfeld. This new unit of energy measurement would describe energy saved, not energy consumed.
The Rosenfeld unit is expected to be used worldwide, just as the eponymous terms volt, watt and joule are used to quantify various measurements of energy.
One Rosenfeld unit represents the energy savings needed to replace the annual generation from a single existing 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant (about the amount used annually by a U.S. city with a population of 250,000). The proposed unit correlates to energy savings of 3 billion kilowatt hours per year at the utility meter.
In addition to the electricity savings, a Rosenfeld represents 3 million metric tons of avoided carbon dioxide emissions annually (assuming all the savings come from an existing coal plant).
Rosenfeld describes potential electricity savings in terms of avoided power plants, he says, because it is easier for people to visualize a power plant than it is to understand an abstraction like billions of kilowatt-hours.
“I wish I had had the Rosenfeld unit before now, as a student and scientist,” said Alan Meier, a visiting scientist at the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center.
“The unit will simplify the way the world communicates the impacts of energy savings and new energy supplies. It will lead to better understanding, and therefore better policy,” Meier concluded.
More than 50 of Rosenfeld's scientist and energy-policy peers, from 26 international institutions, proposed the new measurement in a paper published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Thursday 11th March 2010
