REFRIGERANTS
Reducing climate change emissions from commercial refrigeration applications
Neil Roberts, technical and business development refrigerants EMEA, Chemours UK, discusses ways to cut emissions in the refrigeration industry using the Opteon brand.
W
e’ve all seen the headlines highlighting the devastating eff ects of climate change if not enough is done to reduce the emissions that are fuelling this potentially catastrophic future – but great care should be taken to avoid knee jerk reactions that seem to be the right choice until further scrutiny reveal they were just an expensive mistake.
Within the refrigeration industry it would be easy to assume that the only issue requiring attention would be the emissions of the widely used HFC refrigerants, either by leak reduction or replacement of HFCs with low GWP alternatives. However, the largest contribution to climate change over the lifetime of a refrigeration system is normally the indirect emissions produced from electricity generation, and therefore system performance and energy effi ciency potentially have a far greater eff ect than the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of the refrigerant itself. It’s not entirely surprising there is a lot of inertia in the marketplace as there are numerous diff erent technologies available to retailers. The main technologies currently available are: Water-cooled (WC) Integrals (plug-ins) Air-cooled (AC) Integrals (plug-ins) R290 / Glycol Systems (Secondary System) R134a / Pumped R744 MT (Secondary System)/ sub critical cascaded LT Systems
Lower GWP (<1500) Non-Flammable e.g. Opteon XP40 (R449A) Systems (Baseline Technology)
24 December 2019
Low GWP (<250) HFO A2L Systems, e.g. Opteon XL20 (R454C) and Opteon XL40 (R454A)
Transcritical R744 Booster Systems (FGB).
The major UK retailer, Asda, has spent several years searching for the best path forward for their refrigeration strategy and has looked at various options. Each technology considered was assessed against the following criteria.
Compared to their current <1500 GWP refrigerant option, the new technology needs to: Match Cooling Performance Match or exceed energy performance Match system uptime (minimise risk to trade) Match or improve Total Cost of ownership Ideally match Ease of installation and maintenance.
The criteria Asda used are common to many retailers when considering which technology will give the best balance of environmental benefi ts, system performance and cost.
To solve this problem, Chemours commissioned a study at independent consultants Wave Refrigeration, to make a comparison of the various technologies available to retailers for their refrigeration needs across a range of store footprints, varying system architectures and at diff erent climatic conditions. A detailed description of the technologies was considered.
The study produced by Wave Refrigeration considered each of the listed technologies in stores of two diff erent sizes: Standard supermarket ~2000m2 sales area with design loads of 160 kW medium temperature / 30 kW low temperature
Small supermarket 300-500m2 sales area with design loads of 40 kW medium temperature / 8 kW low temperature, simulating performances in a moderate European climate (Leicester, UK) and a hot European climate (Sevilla, Spain) for comparison.
The results from this study examined the cost (capex and opex) and total emissions (TCO2
e) for
each scenario to make a side-by-side comparison to the baseline Opteon XP40 technology to enable end-users to make the best choice of refrigeration technology to use for the future. By plotting the total 10-yr emissions per kW of cooling values against the 10-yr life cycle cost (LCC)/kW of cooling, a map of where each technology lies from a fi nancial and climate change emissions point of view can be produced. For some operators capex may be an important decision criterion, even though it is incorporated into the 10-yr LCC, so in the bubble charts on the opposit page, the size of the bubble relates to the capex of each technology – that is, a smaller bubble is lower capex than a larger bubble.
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