ENERGY SAVING
Fortune favours the brave
Steve Shipp, managing director of Ultra Refrigeration, explores the role of innovative design and the importance of equipment choice in ensuring system effi ciency and sustainability.
The importance of energy saving and sustainability For businesses, saving energy is no longer just about
reducing cost. It’s also about sustainability and ethicality; it’s simply the right thing to do. Energy is a precious, limited commodity and we all have a moral responsibility – and, as we move towards NetZero, a legal obligation – to become more sustainable. Your customers, suppliers, staff and stakeholders will
Controller (below): Using new- generation controls enables designers to write custom programs which can open up new and innovative avenues toward system effi ciencies.
expect this of you; it earns you the right to do business. It protects your reputation, permits you to operate in certain supply chains and may impact on your ability to raise investment capital. Our view is that innovative system design can help the
refrigeration industry meet the challenges of energy saving and sustainability.
What part does innovation play in refrigeration
system design? We can’t just repeat the same designs we’ve always relied on and expect a diff erent, better outcome. Innovation - new methods, ideas, products - is key to meeting our objectives. We’re looking for a step-change, either from a radically
new way of doing something or by combining a number of incremental changes so that by synergy the overall gain in effi ciency is greater than the sum of the parts. This might be by taking advantage of more advanced component designs, improving the way software operates with hardware, or by gathering more data to enhance control and monitoring. Innovation can be key to saving energy, off ering ongoing cost-savings as well as lower lifetime costs. It can also give customers a competitive edge or a better experience.
A holistic approach to refrigeration system design leads to innovation
Our approach to system design, for new systems or for upgrades, is to take a holistic view. To consider all the heating and cooling requirements of an operation and ask, for an existing system, why things are done in a particular way. This is likely to show more opportunities for innovative ways of tackling the design. We look at innovations from component manufacturers within our sector to see how they can be deployed in existing and new systems to bring effi ciencies. We also look at developments from outside our industry – controls for instance – to explore new ways they can be employed in refrigeration.
It may not be as simple as fi tting new components and
expecting to achieve gains without changing anything else. Take electronic Evaporator Pressure Regulators (EPRs) for example; these can mirror the operation of the old mechanical valves with some small gains in effi ciency. However, the real art, and the source of the really signifi cant gains, is in writing bespoke software and
28 January 2024 •
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