In the Energy Environmental community Arthur H. Rosenfeld holds one of the unique reverent places and is widely admired by colleagues for creating policies that have been at the forefront of environmental movement that is currently shaping the worldwide discussion of power generation, energy consumption, and climate change. Dr. Rosenfeld had a foresight to imagine these energy issue more than 30 years ago, when he switched his field from particle physics to the study of energy and environment in 1975. Rosenfeld’s name for the energy saving unit is well deserved and similar to the names associated with Volt (Alessandro Volta), Watt (James Watt), Joule (James Prescott Joule) and Coulomb (Augustine de Coulomb). There is a great tradition in scientific community to assign a scientist or a major contributor’s name to the unit that is assigned to the emerging respective science.

In simple terms, one unit of Rosenfeld is equivalent of avoiding one coal fired power plant with 500MW of electricity generation capacity. This is equivalent of saving 3 billion kWhr of electricity at the meter, which is equivalent of saving 3 million metric ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year.

Dr Jonathan Koomey’s paper “Defining a standard metric for electricity savings” provides details about the selection criteria for this unit such why “avoidance of 500 MW of coal fired power plant” was selected. Though at first it looks arcane, Dr. Koomey makes a fairly easy to understand argument for choosing this criteria. However, the main point of selection is succinctly summarized in the conclusion or the abstract of the paper; “...The Rosenfeld can best be used in rough back-of-the-envelope calculations and high-level summaries of analysis results for less technical audiences… These parameters satisfy the initial criteria of simplicity of presentation, ease of recall, intuitive plausibility, physical meaning, and policy relevance…”

The original idea for this unit was thought out by Chris Calwell of Ecos Consulting, a well known personality in the power supply community due to his participation in APEC and his contact through PSMA’s Energy Efficiency Committee. Dr Jonathan Koomey (another know personality) made this proposal into reality. The power electronics community should be very proud of Dr Arthur Rosenfeld and his contribution to the energy savings policy.

The US EPA can take steps to make Rosenfeld Unit to be widely accepted and used. Every year EPA, through its ENERGYSTAR program, announces amount of savings in electricity. For example, in 2009 through the ENERGYSTAR programs, the United States saved 191 billion kWhr of electricity which would be 67.7 Rosenfelds. If EPA charts its graphs in Rosenfeld, the unit will be widely used by the electrical engineering community. Coincidently, US Energy Secretary Dr Steven Chu was a former Director of Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory at University of California, Berkeley, the same organization where Dr Arthur Rosenfeld worked as a scientist before joining the California Energy Commission. A simple mention of Rosenfeld by Dr. Chu in one of the numerous press conferences will go a long way to popularize Rosenfeld as a new unit of electrical energy saving.

You can read the entire article “Defining a standard metric for electricity savings” by Jonathan Koomey www.erl.iop.org and read Dr. Arthur H. Rosenfeld’s bio on www.energy.ca.gov (California Energy Commission web site).
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This article first appeared in the April issue of MTC Power Electronics Industry Newsletter.

The views expressed in this article are solely of Mohan Mankikar's alone. They do not represent view of PSMA. Mohan Mankikar has been a part of the power supply industry for over twenty years, has been an active member of PSMA since its founding, and has been on the Board of PSMA and currently acts as an advisor.

Provided by Mohan Mankikar, President, Micro-Tech Consultants

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