SUPERMARKET REFRIGERATION
Gearing up for the latest legislation
Paul Leeman, head of fl ow components and compression sales – UK at GEA looks at ways businesses can mitigate the impact of legislative pressures.
F
orthcoming legislation to reduce emissions might be bad timing for some food manufacturers and cold storage businesses, but they will feel the chill factor if they don’t invest in cooling equipment that meets the latest European directive surrounding refrigerants. Coming into force on 01 January 2020, UK businesses should be planning to replace refrigerants that have Global Warming Potential (GWP) of above 2500 as they will be banned under the European F-Gas legislation in certain static refrigeration applications.
Reclaimed and re-processed refrigerant can continue to be used for servicing of existing equipment until 2030 but is likely to become costly and in short supply – as seen already and previously experienced with the phase out of R22, and more recently the phase down of R404a. Major food manufacturers and well-known supermarkets with large or industrial-size refrigeration plant and applications seem to be on message with long-term strategies to cope with the sea change to reduce HFC emissions, but perhaps some smaller businesses are delaying installing a new system – whether linked to the current Brexit debate or are just uneducated on the legislation – which could come back to haunt them.
Most cooling systems using high GWP gases will have to be replaced with alternative synthetic or preferably natural refrigerants, such as ammonia
28 October 2019
– an environmentally-friendly refrigerant that has no impact on global warming or ozone depletion – and CO2
to comply with the legislation which is set to be applied worldwide.
Companies need to take action sooner rather than later as time is running out to install the new greener-based chiller and freezing systems to reduce their environmental impact, and it is not possible in the vast majority of cases to retrofi t an F-Gas system with a natural substance, especially ammonia.
It’s really bad timing for some producers because on top of the Brexit situation, you’ve got legislative-led change to the market around the corner just when the global economy is stalling and people are being cautious about spending during these challenging times. However, a long-term strategy or a traffi c light system is absolutely essential and I would encourage early involvement of your refrigeration suppliers, when holding planning meetings with production and engineering teams, to get best practice and strategies aligned.
GEA has already installed a large ammonia- based system for a major food manufacturer and retailer incorporating mechanical and absorption cooling, helping to deliver one of the most energy-effi cient frozen food distribution centres in Europe. Usually in a food storage environment up to 90% of energy use is for refrigeration; while this operation has a cooling capacity equivalent
to 12,000 domestic chest freezers, the facility only consumes less than a third of the power used by the two cold stores it is replacing when comparing size. What’s more, water and chemical consumption has been reduced by 86% with the annual water saving equivalent to 11 Olympic sized swimming pools.
The ammonia absorber in the plant rejects its heat into a common condensing system, which enables recovery for both underfl oor heating and defrost.
This considerably reduces other associated waste streams, such as cooling tower water, chemicals, effl uent, fan and pump power. Heat is also recovered for underfl oor heating by subcooling ammonia which not only provides free heat but actually improves the compressor effi ciency to boot.
With the emphasis on energy effi ciency, absorption refrigeration techniques and technologies are becoming more commonplace. Absorption is essentially a cooling refrigeration circuit or system from an abundant heat source that can cleverly be recycled for driving the refrigeration cycle or absorption refrigeration cycle.
If you can scavenge that heat and put it into an absorption system you basically get some free refrigeration cooling but it’s not something widely available to everybody because you need that intense power source.
www.acr-news.com
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