NEWS
Covid-19 Crisis makes world even more dependent on cooling
S
ociety has become even more dependent on cooling technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA). Increasing numbers of people working from home
and using smart technologies has driven up the demand for data centre cooling; and their crucial role in supporting healthcare facilities has thrust refrigeration and air conditioning into the limelight, the Association explained.
This Friday’s World Refrigeration Day (WRD) is, therefore, a timely opportunity to improve the general public’s understanding of the cooling industry and explain its role in supporting society. The theme of this year’s event, which takes place on
26 June every year (the birthday of refrigeration pioneer Lord Kelvin) is ‘Cold Chain 4 Life.’ This highlights the series of actions and technologies needed to ensure vital products, including medicines and food, are preserved from production through to consumption. WRD, which is backed by the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), will also publicise the role of cold chains in reducing food waste that could feed up to 950 million more people worldwide every
year. The UK’s primary F Gas register REFCOM, which is
managed by BESA, is also supporting the global event. “This is all about awareness,” said head of REFCOM Graeme Fox. “Our sector has so many fingers in so many pies that people just don’t know about…and offers fantastic career opportunities to anyone looking to make a difference.” Innovative cooling technologies continue to transform the world including solar-powered refrigeration that means vaccines and food can be preserved in remote communities that have no access to electricity, he explained.
Head of REFCOM Graeme Fox told a BESA webinar that there was strong engineering evidence that air conditioning systems were playing a part in reducing the risk of transmission of the Covid-19 virus. “Cooling coils will remove moisture particles from the air as it passes over them,” he told the webinar. “As the virus is known to be transmitted inside water droplets, this shows that air conditioning is very much part of the solution.” Last year, there were more than 800 WRD events held in 153 countries with many placing particular emphasis
on skills and encouraging young people to consider careers in an industry that already employs more than 50,000 people in the UK. WRD founder Steve Gill told the BESA webinar that it was also important for people to understand how the industry worked so they could “engage with us in an informed way”.
“Everyone is at the end of a cold chain…they are just not always aware of it.” He explained that the lack of a reliable cold chain in many parts of the world meant many potential lifesaving vaccines became unusable. Julie Murray, chair of the Institute of Refrigeration
Scotland added that “we all need cold chains and we all use them, but they are taken for granted”. However, with demand for cooling predicted to treble
between now and 2050, it could be responsible for a surge in carbon emissions at a time when countries have committed to drastically reducing them. As a result, the industry needs to be even more innovative, according to Mr Gill.
“Demand for refrigeration is growing exponentially as the world warms up, but we must grow responsibly,” he said. “We cannot continue as we are…we need to be more sustainable. “However, there is no silver bullet. In fact, the silver bullet is that there is no silver bullet,” Mr Gill told the BESA webinar. “We need different applications for different parts of the world using technological solutions that are appropriate for the local conditions.”
Sainsbury’s celebrates engineers on WRD A
s part of my role in the Sainsbury’s property team one of the things I am responsible for is the engineering and innovation related
to our refrigeration systems, writes David Pilbeam, Sainsbury’s head of innovation. I am a relative newcomer to the world of temperatures and air flow – but what a fascinating world it is. As will be obvious to anyone who has been in a supermarket, we have a huge reliance on refrigeration technologies. What is less obvious to those outside the industry, is the scale of the effort, investment and technological innovation which goes into the design and maintenance of that equipment. As customers, we know how frustrating it is when a store suffers a refrigeration failure. With issues often caused by hot weather, we have a legion of engineers and systems that work night and day to prevent it on a scale I can only imagine is comparable to the moon landings. In the grand timeline of human history, refrigeration is a reasonably recent invention – consumers could reliably refrigerate products in their own homes from the 1950s. Alongside a range of other factors, this laid the foundations for the development of the modern supermarket as we
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know it. Today, refrigeration is key to our customers’ expectations of the products that we sell, and as a result it’s vital for us as a team to get right. At Sainsbury’s, we’re proud pioneers of refrigeration innovation and have a strong track record of championing new technologies. Refrigeration is one of the most significant
contributing parts to our overall energy usage and we have called it out as a key focus on our path to be Net Zero across our own operations by 2040. We’re focussed on bringing some of the most innovative technical solutions to bear on our refrigeration techniques to drive energy usage as low as possible, whilst maintaining the high standards of convenience and reliability that customers require. We have already begun to make headway by
investing substantial time, research and money into refrigeration. So much work we’ve being doing is invisible to customers though is making an incredible difference on our operations, such as increasing the use of natural refrigerant. To this point, we have been working for some time with partners in the motor racing world who use computational fluid dynamic airflow modelling to
bring formula one technology into our refrigerators. We were the first supermarket to install Aerofoils in 2017 after undertaking extensive research into the technology, and earlier this year installed our 400,000th, meaning all our convenience stores and supermarkets are fitted where possible. Our move to roll out Aerofoils across our property estate has resulted in a 15% energy reduction. We know creating partnerships with technological leaders across the world of engineering is key to our future success of reducing our carbon footprint even further. We have a large property estate to trial and test new technologies and always welcome ideas and collaboration from academia and industry. Which brings us to World Refrigeration Day 2020 – we mark a very different day this year to previous years. I’d like to thank all the engineers who have played a vital role by continuing to work through the pandemic, keeping refrigerators operational so Sainsbury’s can get on with the job of feeding the nation. We have fantastic engineers at Sainsbury’s who work with a broad set of industry experts– so thank you all for your efforts and best of luck as we head into summer!
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