@article{24910, keywords = {Energy efficiency, Energy policy}, author = {Jonathan G Koomey and Hashem Akbari and Carl Blumstein and Marilyn A Brown and Richard E Brown and Chris Calwell and Sheryl Carter and Ralph Cavanagh and Audrey Chang and David Claridge and Paul P Craig and Richard C Diamond and Joseph H Eto and William Fulkerson and Ashok J Gadgil and Howard S Geller and José Goldemberg and Charles A Goldman and David B Goldstein and Steve E Greenberg and David Hafemeister and Jeffrey P Harris and Hal Harvey and Eric Heitz and Eric Hirst and Holmes Hummel and Daniel M Kammen and Henry Kelly and John A Laitner and Mark D Levine and Amory Lovins and Gil Masters and James E McMahon and Alan K Meier and Michael Messenger and John Millhone and Evan Mills and Steven M Nadel and Bruce Nordman and Lynn K Price and Joseph J Romm and Marc Ross and Michael Rufo and Jayant A Sathaye and Leon J Schipper and Stephen H Schneider and James L Sweeney and Malcolm Verdict and Diana Vorsatz and Devra Wang and Carl Weinberg and Richard Wilk and John Wilson and Ernst Worrell}, title = {Defining a standard metric for electricity savings}, abstract = {

The growing investment by governments and electric utilities in energy efficiency programs highlights the need for simple tools to help assess and explain the size of the potential resource. One technique that is commonly used in that effort is to characterize electricity savings in terms of avoided power plants, because it is easier for people to visualize a power plant than it is to understand an abstraction like billions of kilowatt hours. Unfortunately, there is no standardization around the characteristics of such power plants. In this article we define parameters for a standard avoided power plant that have physical meaning and intuitive plausibility, for use in back-of-the-envelope calculations. For the prototypical plant this article settles on a 500-megawatt existing coal plant operating at a 70% capacity factor with 7% T&D losses. Displacing such a plant for one year would save 3 billion kWh/year at the meter and reduce emissions by 3 million metric tons of CO2 per year.The proposed name for this metric is the Rosenfeld, in keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question – Dr. Arthur H. Rosenfeld.

}, year = {2010}, journal = {Environmental Research Letters}, volume = {5}, month = {03/2010}, doi = {10.1088/1748-9326/5/1/014017}, note = {

The attached file is a post-print of an article accepted for publication by Environmental Research Letters. To view the published article, click here.

}, language = {eng}, }