ENERGY SAVING EQUIPMENT The F-Gas
we’re not past the halfway point yet!
By Neil Roberts, senior technical sales manager at Climalife. T
he current version of the F-Gas legislation has been in place for seven years, and as another year begins the F-Gas legislation introduces new restrictions for two types of equipment used in the refrigeration industry.
From 1 January 2022 it is no longer be allowed to use a refrigerant with a GWP of 150 or more in new equipment for storage, display or dispensing of products, for sale to end users, in retail and food services, where the equipment is either a hermetically sealed refrigerator or freezer or a multipack centralised refrigeration systems with a rated capacity of 40 kW or more.
These new restrictions have been known since 2015 and are not expected to cause any significant disruption, as there are refrigerants and equipment available to fulfil the requirement and apart from a period in 2017/2018, when high GWP refrigerant availability and price became problematic, it would appear the industry is coping well with the restrictions and the tonnes CO2
equivalents (TCO2 phasedown imposed by the legislation.
But is this really the situation? Can we as an industry relax in the knowledge that everything is under control or does the industry need to continue to move to new lower GWP technologies to keep up with the phase-down requirement and achieve the target of 79% reduction of TCO2
e placed on the market by 2030. 26 January 2022 •
www.acr-news.com e)
F-Gas effect on refrigerant choice and timing. It is important to plan to get ahead of the phasedown requirement. The F-Gas TCO2
e phasedown can be roughly
translated into an average GWP of refrigerants placed on the market. The previous step down in January 2021 brought the average to approximately 900, i.e. well below the GWP of R-134a, and by 2024 the average GWP required to meet the phasedown will fall to approximately 600. It’s tempting to look at these figures and conclude that the industry must be on track since the current availability and price of HFCs appears to be relatively stable but there are underlying reasons as to why this may not be the case. Up until the end of 2020 Great Britain still came under the EU quota system and therefore the significant quantities of HFCs illegally imported into the EU effectively meant there was more than enough available throughout the whole of the EU, including the UK.
This timing also meant that the industry in Great Britain was able to prepare at the end of 2020 in advance of the Great Britain F-Gas quota allocations that came into effect in 2021.
The direct effects of illegal imports into Great Britain continue to be a significant factor with more than £1 million penalties issued in September 2021 to a company illegally importing HFCs and reports in November 2021 from the BBC of availability of illegal HFCs via online channels.
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transformation: So far so good but
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