Deconstructing the `Rosenfeld Curve': Why is per capita residential energy consumption in California so low?

Since the early 1970s, electricity consumption per capita in California has stayed nearly constant, while rising steadily for the US as a whole. At the same time, state energy policies have led the nation in encouraging energy e ciency programs and stringent appliance and building standards. In addition to regulatory policy, California has incentivized utilities to implement a diverse set of programs with the aim of reducing consumer demand for energy through the adoption of e cient technologies and conservation behavior. Eom and Sweeney [11] provide an overview of some of these activities, most of which are primarily focused on the demand side. Gillingham et al. [13] provide a more national level review of demand side programs. The California experiment with energy e ciency has become a well known case study today. So much so that in a recent issue of the Journal of Environmental Research Letters, an article entitled `De ning a standard metric for electricity savings' (Koomey et al. 21) authored by many of the United State's leading energy and environment economists and engineers suggested creating a unit to measure energy e ciency savings called the `Rosenfeld', ...in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scienti c principle in question Dr Arthur H Rosenfeld. A recent discussion of energy e ciency in the widely read Science journal (7) also focused on the Rosenfeld curve. In this context, it is unsurprising that a causal link is often drawn between a set of regulatory policies and utility programs and the di erential between state and national electricity per-capita consumption levels. Indeed a graph comparing retail sales of electricity per capita for California and the United States is often casually referred to as the `Rosenfeld Curve', after Arthur Rosenfeld, the in uential member of