Why does the changing of cpufreq governor settings /etc/rc.local does not survive upon reboot?

Issue

After performing cahnges in /etc/rc.local in order to change the cpufreq governor to "performance" with commands like:

# cpupower frequency-set --governor performance

It works right away:

[root@example ~]# for g in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor; do cat $g; done
userspace
userspace
...

But after boot time these changes are discarded.