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Supermarket Coolers Used To Heat Building

Monday, June 19th, 2006 by admin   Subscribe To My Feed

Grocery stores are exploring a new technology that allows heat capture from the energy used to run their food coolers. This is for serious energy creation and completely eliminates the heating source, (even in very cold weather). This significantly reduces the energy and puts cash directly in the business owners pocket. While this isn’t an alternative energy source, this is an example of creative thinking to solve a problem and profit from it. If you are interested in learning how to think creatively; go to the following idea creation website to learn how this works. If you want to read more about this technology, take a look at the rest of this post here.

The Canadian Press

OTTAWA – The manager of a large grocery store in Quebec was skeptical when Natural Resources Canada told him he could run his 9,450-square-metre store during bone-chilling winters without a furnace.

Heading into the Christmas holiday season in 2004, government researchers helped design the brand new grocery store for Loblaws, near Montreal, with a unique, revolutionary system that allows it to use its refrigerators to heat the building.

“In December, and the months that followed the opening in 2004, it was an especially cold period, -26 C and

-30 C,” said Dr. Sophie Hosatte, a senior NRCan researcher. “It’s a critical period for the supermarket in terms of sales, (but) there was absolutely no problem. The comfort level was excellent inside the supermarket.”

More than two years later, the system continues to keep the store running through winters, capturing heat and energy released by the refrigerators and pumping it back into the building. As a result it drastically slashes costs for heating and maintenance, as well as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, Hosatte said.

In a single store, NRCan estimates the system can cut greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5 megatonnes, the equivalent of 300 cars driving 20,000 kilometres in a year. But since the new government is in the midst of reviewing all climate change programs and policies developed when the federal Liberals were in power, the future of the technology is in limbo.

“We are in a transition year,” Hosatte said. “For the future, we have to wait for the new climate change plan.”

NRCan continuously monitors and measures the performance of the system throughout the store, and so far, Hosatte said the results are meeting their targets perfectly. The technology has also been adapted in two Loblaws grocery stores in the Ottawa area, which retrofitted their heating systems along with about a dozen ice rinks and arenas across the country.

While her department has demonstrated the system works well, she said it still needs to provide more technical support to help private sector partners apply and adapt the technology.

“That’s our role, presently, to develop tools, guidelines and to help supermarkets adapt these technologies,” she said. “Otherwise there would be reluctance because of the risk.”

The researchers may take comfort the Conservative government has pledged to encourage more energy savings in the construction and transportation industry. But there are no guarantees which programs are going to stick around, once the Tories finalize their new climate change program in the fall.

Some researchers say there’s enough technology available for Canada to effectively tackle its target under the international Kyoto Protocol on climate change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by six-per-cent below 1990 levels. But it takes a political will and economic incentives such as reducing energy costs to apply those technologies, said Frederic Genest, an engineer with Pageau Morel and Associes.

Genest’s firm recently designed a hybrid ground source heating and cooling system for a new Mountain Equipment Co-op store in Montreal, that is boasting 65-per-cent savings in energy consumption.

“There are a lot of possibilities, there are many things that we could do,” said Genest. “Some things that are really simple — things that maybe require a complete refit of a building sometimes. Each building is a different case.”

Mike De Souza
CanWest News Service

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