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

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.

BT - Environmental Research Letters C1 -

1.1

C2 - LBNL-2213E DA - 03/2010 DO - 10.1088/1748-9326/5/1/014017 IS - 1 LA - eng N1 -

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

N2 -

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.

PY - 2010 ST - Environ. Res. Lett. T2 - Environmental Research Letters TI - Defining a standard metric for electricity savings VL - 5 ER -