Energy unit may be named a 'Rosenfeld'

BERKELEY, Calif., March 11 (UPI) -- A U.S.-led international group of scientists says it has proposed the name of physicist Arthur Rosenfeld be used for a unit of electricity savings.

The 54 scientists from 26 institutions around the world propose using the name "Rosenfeld" to define electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year -- the amount needed to replace the annual generation of a 500 megawatt coal-fired power plant.

Rosenfeld earned a degree in physics in 1954 from the University of Chicago -- where, according to Wikipedia, he was Enrico Fermi's last graduate student -- and started his career at the University of California-Berkeley and Berkeley Lab during the 1950s as a physicist in the Nobel Prize-winning particle physics group of Luis Alvarez.

In 1975 he founded the Center for Building Science at the Berkeley Lab where many energy efficiency standards and technologies were subsequently developed, the scientists said.

Rosenfeld already has two terms named after him: the Rosenfeld effect and Rosenfeld's law.

The Rosenfeld effect explains why California's per capita electricity usage has remained flat since the mid-1970s while U.S. usage has steadily climbed. The term has been popularized by U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, who has called Rosenfeld a hero of his.

Rosenfeld's law states the amount of energy required to produce $1 of economic output decreases by about 1 percent per year.

A Rosenfeld unit is expected to be used as the terms volt, watt and joule are used for various measurements of energy in honor of other physicists.

The proposal appears in the journal Environmental Research Letters.