Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [82]
This would not be an operation that could be accomplished from the outside. Only the government could set across-the-board standards. As it turned out, John Holdren, then a Berkeley professor, was very familiar with Rosenfeld’s work and happened to know that then-California governor Jerry Brown was going to be on campus. Holdren encouraged Rosenfeld to explain the refrigerator work to Brown over dinner at the faculty club.
At 7:45 a.m. the next morning, Brown, obviously excited, called California energy commissioner Gene Varanini and asked if Rosenfeld’s numbers could possibly be right. Varanini thought they were, and within two years, new standards for refrigerators and freezers were put into effect. The California standards were eventually adopted nearly en toto at the federal level. Now the savings resulting from more efficient refrigerators—as compared with the 1975 models—can be calculated at $16 billion per year.26 As Rosenfeld likes to point out, that number stacks up well with the $17 billion worth of wholesale electricity sales by all the country’s nuclear power plants.
There is a graph that Rosenfeld likes to show when he gives one of his many talks. It shows electricity consumption in California and the United States since 1960. From 1960 to 1974 California follows the national trend almost exactly. But from that year until 2008, the country continues to rise while California’s electricity usage stays roughly flat. In energy circles, they even call this the Rosenfeld curve or “the Rosenfeld effect.”27
Consumers in the state of California now enjoy a situation unlike almost any other state. They pay higher than average prices for each kilowatt-hour of electricity but that energy does more useful work heating, cooling, or lighting. The net effect is that Californians actually pay smaller total energy bills than their counterparts in other states despite the higher unit costs. But that famous graph requires a bit of nuance. In his talks to technical audiences, he takes pains to note that he doesn’t think California’s energy policies are solely responsible for that entire discrepancy. About one-third, he says, can be attributed to the policies he helped put in place.
The famous Rosenfeld effect has received detailed scrutiny in recent years. A study by the director of Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency, James Sweeney, called “Deconstructing the Rosenfeld Curve” pegged the maximum contribution of California policy to 23 percent of the difference between the state and the nation.28 The rest of the Rosenfeld effect is debatably due to what Sweeney called “structural factors” like urbanization levels, household size, commercial floor space per capita, and the inherently nicer climate in California.29 Even so, Rosenfeld’s accomplishments are still remarkable. Few people could be said to have changed so much with such little investment and so few resources.
In March 2010 dozens of scientists signed a paper proposing to name a new unit of measurement “the Rosenfeld.” It would denote the energy and money saved by not building a five hundred–megawatt coal-fired power plant. The honorific is a symbol for how influential Rosenfeld has become and how deep his ideas have reached. One of his closest collaborators at Berkeley, John Holdren, is now President Barack Obama’s science adviser. And as Amory Lovins noted in 2008, Holdren’s students “have gone on to take over much of