R744.com summarises key findings from the first session on Tuesday morning kicked off with three presentations on market trends for natural refrigerants.

Market figures are key – but not available so far for natural refrigerant installations. That is why the first three presentations at ATMOsphere Europe 2011 tried to summarise the available market information and present to policy makers an initial overview with the invitation to the floor to give more input.

"Natural Refrigerants in the European HVAC&R industry: market trends" by Nina Burhenne, shecco

The summary report of ATMOsphere 2010, the international workshop on natural refrigerants held last year, clearly identified the need for industry and policy to actively address existing barriers and to quantify the market potential for natural refrigerants.

For this reason, shecco initiated the world’s largest industry survey to illustrate and quantify the market potential of natural working fluids. The objective was to create a basis of reference and to inform industry, end-users and policy about:

• market state, trends and drivers for natural refrigerants
• adoption potential per world region
• barriers to and opportunities in the use of CO₂, NH3, HC

In 5 months, a total of 1,136 responses from professionals in 92 countries were collected. Europe was clearly identified as the market with the greatest potential for natural refrigerants with CO₂ leading, ammonia following closely behind and hydrocarbons a bit farther off in terms of positive policy and industry developments.

Training and Know-how as well as Technology and Safety were identified as the strongest barriers to an uptake of natural refrigerants, followed by Funding and Costs, Psychology as well as Legislation.

The conclusion is that while information is key, the overall awareness among industry, policy and end-users is still low. In this perspective, the results will be summarised in The GUIDE 2011, an easy-to-access and concise reference guide to the global market for CO₂, ammonia and hydrocarbons. This open source document is distributed free of charge to industry, end-users and policy.

But The GUIDE 2011 does not only give an overview of market trends. It comprises a global user’s guide on natural refrigerants, an analysis of relevant EU policies, technical case studies, a company directory, but most of all a CO₂ supermarket map, giving a first overview of how many commercial refrigeration installations with natural refrigerants have been installed so far across Europe. An invaluable tool in proving that natural refrigerants have matured into viable and sustainable solutions.

"Market developments for CO₂ in commercial refrigeration" by Christoph Brouwers and Lothar Serwas, Carrier

Continuing on commercial refrigeration, Carrier talked about market drivers for CO₂ refrigeration. The company started in 2004 with a first installation of their CO₂OLtec system in Switzerland, continued pilot projects until the end of 2009 and has since then gone into series production and system installations with as of September 2011 over 300 CO₂ retail stores.

For Carrier, CO₂ direct expansion systems (DX) have emerged as state of the art solution in food retail stores today. Additionally, the life-cycle cost comparison starts to incline favourably towards CO₂ with a more attractive return on investment (ROI) in large store formats. There reasons for this trend are manifold:

• prices of HFC refrigerants are rising rapidly as well as refrigerant disposal costs at the end of the life cycle
• cost for energy is rising continuously
• compliance with the F-Gas Regulation adds to cost of ownership
• risk of potential refrigerant conversion and additional costs due to possibly tightened requirements of a revised F-Gas Regulation

These developments have led to retailers being more and more prepared to review their investment strategy towards natural refrigerants. However, supporting policy action and volume growth are key to strengthen this trend and to improve the ROI for smaller format stores.

Carrier’s next intends to overcome what is called the “CO₂ equator” going through South Europe and the Mediterranean. This “CO₂ equator” is based on real time figures of data recording of around 200 CO₂ systems, compared to a couple of thousands of HFC systems.

With the next generation CO₂ DX system, Carrier wants to prove that CO₂ transcritical systems have at least the same energy performance than highly efficient HFC systems under every European climate condition. Pilot testing is planned for next year.

The estimated amount of emissions reductions of CO₂ systems vs R404A systems from the 300 installed CO₂ stores are 49% or 77,600 tons of CO₂ eq – this equals the emissions of 23,200 cars in one year!

"European Heat Pump Markets 2011" by Thomas Nowak, European Heat Pump Association (EHPA)

The European Heat Pump Association will be publishing the European Heat Pump Statistics “Outlook 2011” next week. A first glance shows that accumulated sales have been 3,77 million units in the period 2005-2010 in 20 European markets.

The growth amongst the different markets is however not the same. Germany, France, Finland, Portugal and Sweden are strong markets for heat pumps, mainly for geo-thermal energy. These markets have been strongly affected by the economic downturn.

Currently on the upturn, is the market for reversible air-air heat pumps, which are usually smaller and cheaper. Market trends are therefore faster to change (up and down). But the positive trend is likely to be maintained or even intensified by legislation such as the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD).

Heat pumps have furthermore the potential to help Member States of the European Union to achieve the 2020 target for integrating 20% of renewable energy sources (RES) in their energy mix. Indeed, EHPA projects a necessary growth path of 11% per year for heat pumps in order for RES targets of the National Renewable Plans to be met.

All observable trends indicate that “the cake is getting bigger” as Thomas Nowak, Secretary General of EHPA, puts it. Natural refrigerants do have a potential to take advantage of this trend and grab substantial market share, especially in sanitary hot water production. However, Mr Nowak also gave present industry representatives a clear message: “If you really want change you need to provide economic and environmentally efficient solutions suitable for the mass-market.”