Tag : refrigerants

First published in Frozen & Refrigerated Buyer Magazine May 2015

Store level programs can hide huge dollar losses from refrigeration leaks.

People often ask me to name the single most effective way to cut supermarket refrigeration leaks, based on my time heading up the EPA’s GreenChill Partnership.

My response usually surprises them: Your first priority should be to switch from an individual-store-based refrigerant management strategy to one that is centralized at headquar­ters. This switch produced a 10% re­duction in corporatewide leaks in one GreenChill partner’s first few months in the Partnership. This partner had more than a thousand stores and this 10% reduction equaled at least 150,000 pounds of refrigerant. Mul­tiply that by about $5.00 a pound way back then, and you get a cool $750,000 cost saving off the bottom line.

What do I mean when I recom­mend shifting to headquarters refrig­erant management? Well, refrigerant management has historically been the responsibility of the individual store. In fact, Section 608 refrigerant regulations place the responsibility for record keeping and repair of leaks at the individual store level. That is the single biggest flaw in Section 608 and the reason it has largely been a failure in reducing and preventing harmful refrigerant leaks.

Headquarters management shifts the responsibility for refrigerant tracking, management, and strat­egy to a central person who has the responsibility for all stores. Just to be clear: this does not do away with individual store responsibility under Section 608. I would never encour­age anyone to flout the law, even one that has as its only accomplishment the killing of trees in the name of superior record-keeping.

If headquarters begins managing refrigerants centrally, there has to be a system in place for individual stores to produce all records required under Section 608, should an EPA inspector ask for them. Cen­trally managing all required informa­tion on leaks greatly increases the likeli­hood that a store will be able to produce those records. If left to their own devices, individual stores rarely produce adequate leak repair records. The most likely re­sponse from a store manager when asked for refrigerant records by an EPA inspector is something like “I don’t have anything to do with that stuff.”

So how did a shift to headquarters management lead to such a huge reduction in leaks in such a short period of time in the exam­ple cited above? First of all, calculating a corporatewide leak rate for the first time usually opens the eyes of the top brass to the enor­mous amount of money a company wastes on replace­ment refrigerant. And that’s the key: the realization that the best financial path is to solve this corporatewide problem.

An individual store manager looks at refrigerant leaks as a cost of doing business. He or she is often unaware that something can be done about the problem, or if aware, doesn’t have the time to become a refrigeration expert to figure out how to solve it. The store manager’s job is to sell groceries. A person at headquarters who has been hired to tackle this problem would have the knowledge and the time that individual store managers lack.

Centralized refrigerant manage­ment leads to quick wins by focus­ing attention on the horrendous leak rates at some stores. From the perspective of the individual stores, these leak rates are probably consid­ered normal. But a per­son who has the records for all stores sees that a small number of outliers make up a large percent­age of the leaks. He or she can target those stores as the first priority. Sometimes sending out contractors to investigate the problem leads to the simple solution: finding and repairing the leaks instead of just topping off the refrigerant every month. If the problems are more complex, headquarters can allocate funds to tackle them in other ways, includ­ing investing in a new system if that saves money in the long-term.

$30,000 FINES PER DAY Centralized refrigeration manage­ment often alerts corporate officials to the potential legal liability from non-compliance with refrigerant regulations. At $30,000 per viola­tion, per day, fines can be much more expensive than investing in better refrigerant management.

There are other examples of the benefits in switching to centralized refrigeration management, but they all boil down to the same premise: better companywide refrigeration management results in better com­panywide financial management. The environmental benefits are a pleasant side effect.

First published in Frozen & Refrigerated Buyer Magazine April 2015

Special interests want to expand Section 608 refrigerant leak regula­tions. But what it needs is a major overhaul.

The Alliance for Responsible Atmospheric Policy, a Washington, D.C., special interest group, petitioned the EPA last year to expand Section 608 refrigerant leak repair regulations to include HFC refrigerants. The EPA’s Section 608 regulations currently apply only to ozone-depleting refrig­erants, and since HFC refrigerants do not harm the ozone layer, they do not now fall under its scope.

INEFFECTIVE REGULATION

The petition from the Alliance has many in the supermarket industry shaking their heads. Expanding Section 608 to include HFCs just takes an ineffective regulation and adds more stuff to it. The regulation already contains everything and the kitchen sink, including several provisions that most agree are pretty useless.

In addition, the petition does noth­ing to solve the real problem that Ti­tle VI of the Clean Air Act is meant to address: our nation’s enormous refrigerant leak problem. The current Section 608 does not mandate that a supermarket leak less — it simply says that once a supermarket leaks 35% of its refrigerant charge, records must be kept to show that leaks are repaired within 30 days of discov­ery. In fact, it’s perfectly legal for a supermarket to double its leak rate every year. You can leak 10,000 pounds of refrigerant every year and still be fully in compliance.

Many in the su­permarket industry are pretty clear on the actions they should be taking to try to solve this problem. At the risk of sounding like Captain Obvi­ous, the solution to supermarkets’ refrigerant leaks is leak prevention. Leak prevention is possible, afford­able, and readily available to every supermarket. Today.

The EPA in 2008 started a program to encourage supermarkets’ invest­ment in refrigeration technologies that prevent leaks: GreenChill’s Store Certification Program. The program gave platinum, gold, and silver awards to stores that achieved very significant refrigerant emissions reductions. After three years, the program had over-performed beyond anyone’s hopes. It wasn’t just reducing refriger­ant emissions; it was preventing them.

Every store that GreenChill had certi­fied as platinum had a 0% leak rate. Let me say that another way: these stores had never leaked a pound of refrigerant since they started operating. The companies behind these stores had completely changed the way they managed refrigeration, investing up front in technology that used very little refrigerant and then leaked nothing during years of operation. Some of the stores used only a few hundred pounds of refrigerant, com­pared to a typical store which uses about 3,500 pounds. One store even operated on less than 100 pounds.

Gold-certified stores averaged a leak rate of 0.5%. Silver-certified stores leaked just 3.8%, compared to a typical store in the United States that leaks 25% of its very large charge size.

While the Store Certification Program proved that certain refrigeration technol­ogy options are better at preventing harmful leaks, namely those that use modular chill­er units, CO2 cascade systems, and natural refrigerant technolo­gies like CO2 transcrit-ical systems, every type of technol­ogy in operation in the country was able to achieve some level of certifi­cation. Even centralized DX systems, which use thousands of pounds of refrigerant and are notoriously leaky, could be greatly improved if de­signed to the certification standards. At minimum, they reduced their charge by 50% and achieved very low leak rates, attaining silver and gold certification awards.

A GOOD QUESTION

So if solutions to the nation’s leak problem are possible, affordable, and readily available right now, why isn’t the Alliance petitioning the EPA to incorporate these solutions into their regulations? Could it be because a regulation that mandated large reductions in charge sizes and technologies that prevent leaks would result in Alliance members selling significantly less refrigerant every year? I’ll let you decide.

First published in Frozen & Refrigerated Buyer Magazine October 2014

About five years ago at the FMI Energy Conference, I gave a plenary presenta­tion on the EPA’s R-22 phaseout. I posed a question to the audience: Why were supermar­kets paying people to come and haul away their used R-22? I commented, admittedly somewhat facetiously, that paying someone to come and take away your used R-22 after a refrigerant ret­rofit was like finding a suitcase full of money bur­ied in your basement and paying a junk collector to come and haul it away for you.

I was confronted by several reclaimers after the presentation who told me that my analogy was ex­tremely flawed. The money in the suitcase would have to be so dirty that it couldn’t be used unless it was cleaned and made like new. They assured me that I’d gladly pay someone to haul away money that was covered in mud and grease. The conversation then deteriorated into jokes about money laundering, and, as is often the case at the FMI Energy Conference, the conversation resulted in more questions than answers.

Over the past five years, supermarket industry prac­tices with respect to used R-22 have certainly changed. Most recognize now that the value of a pound of used R-22 is about equal to the price you’d pay to pur­chase a pound of new R-22. The common practice is to recycle the used R-22 in-house by running it through a filter drier and storing it for use in the company’s other R-22 systems. Supermarkets save money by not having to purchase as much new R-22, but they also protect them­selves by hedging against future price increases and/or R-22 shortages as the R-22 phaseout progresses to its end stage in 2020.

I know of companies that have not had to purchase R-22 for the past three years because they have their own stockpiles. They watched the R-22 prices rise and fall over the past few years with big smiles on their faces. They aren’t worried about possible price increases when the EPA cuts production of R-22 again next year. Year after year, these companies need less and less R-22, while building up more and more of a reserve. Imagine not hav­ing to worry at all, ever again, about the R-22 phaseout.

Companies do face some challenges in managing these R-22 reserves. How do you transport the R-22 between stores? Where do you store it until it’s needed? Who keeps track of all that R-22? How do you make sure that your refriger­ant doesn’t fall off the back of a truck at some point, especially as the price of R-22 goes up? Finally, how much time do you want your refrigera­tion team to spend on your R-22 stockpile, instead of keeping your display cases cold? All of these issues are manageable, as demonstrated by the numerous companies that have successfully ex­ecuted their plan for used R-22 over the past few years.

DO THE MATH

If a company does 10 R-22 retrofits in a year, pulling out about 3,000 pounds from each of those 10 systems, the company has a stockpile of about 30,000 pounds of R-22. If R-22 costs $10 per pound, you’ve got an asset of about $300,000. Remember that this $300,000 would other­wise be a cost to the company as it purchases new R-22 for its systems. If you take the standard assumption of a 1% profit margin for a super­market, a company has to sell about $30 million worth of goods to earn $300,000.

I have yet to run into a com­pany that can’t find or hire someone to manage an asset of this size. I’d do it. And believe me, if I found a suitcase full of that much money in my basement, I’d find a way to clean the mud and grease off it, too.