Rosenfeld Effect

The Rosenfeld Effect is not a scientific phenomena, but an empirical fact that electricity use per capita in California (CA) has been almost flat from 1973 to 2006, whereas use in the United States has risen 50%. The effect is attributed to energy efficiency, a cause pioneered by Arthur H. Rosenfeld. Up until 2010 Dr. Rosenfeld was the commissioner and a very prominent member of the California Energy Commission board and presided over the Research, Development, and Demonstration Committee; the Dynamic Pricing Committee; and the Energy Efficiency Committee, whose main purposes are to promote energy efficiency and conservation, to support cutting edge research and, to look towards developing renewable energy sources.

A conference in 2006 at UC Berkeley was dedicated to the Rosenfeld Effect. The purpose of the Energy Symposium conference on the Rosenfeld Effect was to inform people of the role increased energy efficiency plays in California, China, Russia, and on a much larger global scale.

According to Dr. Rosenfeld, as time progresses, new technological breakthroughs make electrical appliances more efficient and longer lasting than their older counterparts. For example, when refrigerators were made in 1974, the model consumed four times as much energy compared to refrigerators manufactured in 2001. As the appliances became more efficient, they would save more energy, which consequently lowered the amount of money the average person paid for electricity to keep the appliance running. The cheaper cost of higher efficiency is also the premise behind Rosenfeld's Law, which is also attributed to Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld believed that reasonable standards for energy efficiency in numerous appliances could guarantee a drastic reduction in energy consumption. As opposed to national precedents set in the early 1990s, California's earlier standards for energy efficiency contributed much to these technological discoveries.

The Rosenfeld Effect is often associated with the following two charts:

The first graph is Figure 1 of the 2007 California Integrated Energy Policy Report and is sometimes referred to as the Rosenfeld Curve. The second is widely used in Powerpoint presentations.

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