DOE resources to boost U.S. food retail innovation

The Better Buildings initiative, administered by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), helps to improve energy efficiency in buildings throughout the United States by bringing the public and private sectors together to accelerate investment and share ideas.

Participants in the first GreenChill webinar of 2017, held on 10 January, heard about resources for food retailers offered by the DOE under the Better Buildings framework.

Better Buildings seeks to boost energy efficiency in public, residential, commercial and industrial buildings by 20% over the next decade. The program provides access to experts, tools and other resources, and provides peer-to-peer learning opportunities and public recognition. The solutions centre showcases succesful case studies. Better Buildings currently boasts 213 commerical partners responsible for 11 billion sq. ft. of space, representing 12% of U.S. commercial buildings.

Refrigeration technology helps to achieve the energy savings goals of the Better Buildings Initiative, as highlighted during the webinar by Refrigeration Technology Team experts Justin Elszasz and Andrew Mitchell. The team is also in the process of developing a Refrigeration Toolkit to support energy-efficiency and alternative refrigerants in commercial refrigeration, including case studies, design guidance, calculators, fact sheets, reports and presentations.

Elszasz highlighted the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Refrigeration Playbook: Natural Refrigerants, which features a comprehensive guidebook and a spreadsheet tool. Another useful resource is the Oak Ridge National Laboratory report on design and lab evaluation of high-efficiency, low-emission transcritical CO₂ booster systems, selected from several alternatives based on energy and lifecycle cost modeling.

The team also mentioned their popular reality show series SWAPPED, which sees two companies’ management teams switch places and evaluate one another’s energy management. One episode stars the team at Whole Foods, a leading advocate of natural refrigerants in food retail, who swap places with Hilton’s.