Arthur Hinton Rosenfeld (June 22, 1926 – January 27, 2017) was a University of California, Berkeley physicist and California energy commissioner, dubbed the "Godfather of Energy Efficiency", for developing new standards which helped improve energy efficiency in California and subsequently worldwide.
Rosenfeld was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1926. Starting in 1954 he served as a professor of physics at the UC Berkeley and a senior staff member at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 1994, he served in the Clinton administration as senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy. In 2000, he was appointed Commissioner of the California Energy Commission, serving until his retirement in 2010.
His work helped lead to such breakthroughs as low-energy electric lights, such as compact fluorescent lamps, low-energy refrigerators, and windows that trap heat. In his fight against global warming, he has saved Americans billions of dollars in electricity bills.
Rosenfeld was born in Birmingham, Alabama on June 22, 1926. He spent his early years in New Orleans during the Great Depression. His father was an expert in sugar cane cultivation, which took the family to Egypt when he was six years old. As a student in Egypt, he made friends with students from Europe, and learned about their inclination to saving energy. "Europeans only used half as much energy ... and it was clear that their lifestyle was as good as ours," he later said.
While still in high school, he took college-level courses, which helped him earn a bachelor's degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute when he was 17. He served in the U.S. Navy for two years at the end of World War II, where he taught radar operations. He next entered graduate school at the University of Chicago, and studied particle physics under Enrico Fermi, a Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist. Rosenfeld coauthored a book on nuclear physics with Fermi, who was noted for building the world's first nuclear reactor.
In 1954, after earning his Doctor of Philosophy in physics, and with a recommendation from Fermi, Rosenfeld accepted a position as a teaching physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
At Berkeley, Rosenfeld joined the University of California Department of Physics and the particle physics research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) led by Nobel Laureate Luis Walter Alvarez. Alvarez went on to win the Nobel Prize with research backed by his team of scientists that included Rosenfeld.
In 1957, he became professor of physics, later professor emeritus, and was one of the founding members of the international Particle Data Group. He developed the reputation of being a workaholic, arriving to work very early, taking a dinner break with his family, and continuing to work until 2 a.m.
A turning point in his career came as a result of the second Arab oil embargo in 1973, when he realized that one of the key vulnerabilities of Americans was their inefficient and wasteful use of limited energy. The embargo caused an energy crisis, with long lines at gas stations and higher energy prices nationwide.
He was annoyed at seeing colleagues in his building leaving lights on at the end of the day, and took it upon himself to go throughout the building turning them off. At the same time, California utilities were projecting a 7 percent annual growth in electric demand, and were planning to build a number of nuclear power plants along the coast.
His mission changed when he became convinced, as he said, "it would be more profitable to attack our own wasteful energy use than to attack OPEC." He noted that "if we Americans used energy as efficiently as do the Europeans or Japanese, we would have been exporting oil in 1973." While most researchers at the time were trying to find ways of producing more energy, Rosenfeld committed himself from then on to reducing energy use.
As a result, his research focus shifted away from particle physics and instead to energy efficiency. To organize a team of scientists to work on it, he established the Center for Building Science at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which he would lead until 1994. Ashok Gadgil, a senior scientist at the lab, who had once been one of Rosenfeld's graduate students, explains that Rosenfeld was the first to calculate how much energy would be saved with new standards. "It was a revelation," says Gadgil, when they looked at the projected savings.
Energy efficiency standards developed
The center under his leadership developed a number of energy efficiency technologies, including heat trapping window coating and compact fluorescent lights. Rosenfeld helped develop computer models used to understand and calculate the energy use of buildings. Those computer models were later adopted as national standards for building energy analysis by the Department of Energy.
Rosenfeld's attention to energy conservation inspired thousands of energy researchers during his career. "He truly shaped the way an entire generation of researchers and policymakers worked together to conserve resources," said Berkeley Lab director Mike Witherell. Engineers, beginning with those in his lab, now began to analyze the energy efficiency of everyday things. That led to breakthroughs in not only low-energy lights, but also windows, refrigerators, air conditioners, and other appliances, along with the design of entire buildings. It led to California becoming a model of energy conservation for the nation, and in 1978 it was the first state to approve a strong energy-efficiency building code, called Title 24.
He developed DOE-2, a computer program for building energy analysis and design that was incorporated into the new code. The codes themselves became models for other states, copied by Florida and Massachusetts, among them. DOE-2 is used to calculate codes and guidelines for energy efficient new buildings by various countries, including China.
Other states and countries became aware that although homes in California were loaded with new energy-consuming appliances, such as computers, large-screen TVs, iPods, PlayStations, central air conditioners, hot tubs and swimming pools, their per person energy use had remained the same as it was 30 years earlier. Much of the savings was attributed to Rosenfeld's "passion to wring the most out of every kilowatt." He gave energy regulators the data they needed to enact some of the strongest efficiency standards in the world.
Those standards impacted various industries: New homes and buildings were required to have better insulation and to be fitted with energy-saving lights; heating and cooling systems had to be more efficient; appliances were redesigned to use less power; and utilities were told to motivate their customers to use less electricity. Rosenfeld acted on his basic principle: "Conserving energy is cheaper and smarter than building power plants."