“Dr. Rosenfeld is one of the ‘founding fathers’ of energy efficiency, and the legacy of his research and policy work is an entire new energy efficiency sector of our economy, which now yields an astounding annual savings of around $100 billion, and growing.”
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Rosenfeld received his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1954 and was Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi’s last graduate student.
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In 1973, when OPEC embargoed oil sales to the West, Dr. Rosenfeld redirected his career. He recognized the potential for energy savings in the building sector, which uses one third of U.S. primary energy and two-thirds of our electricity. In 1975, he founded a program which grew into the Center for Building Science at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
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The U.S. National Research Council (NRC) has estimated that energy efficiency improvements developed solely at DOE’s National Laboratories, saved the U.S. $30 billion between 1978 and 2000

“You can put windows on a new house, which cuts the heating bill by 30%,” Rosenfeld says, adding, “[you] are indeed saving more oil every year than comes out of Prudhoe Bay.” The fields at Prudhoe Bay Alaska are America’s major domestic source of oil. So the energy savings are really adding up now.

And Dr. Rosenfeld’s lab has done even more. He ticks them off: “Compact fluorescent lamps are saving another $5 billion a year. Better programs for designing buildings are saving like $10 billion a year.

The Enrico Fermi Award is given to encourage excellence in energy science and technology; to show appreciation to scientists, engineers, and science policymakers who have given unstintingly over their lifetimes to benefit mankind through energy science and technology