World's largest transcritical CO₂ system commissioned in California

The world's largest transcritical CO₂ refrigeration system has been installed and commissioned at Yosemite Foods, a California-based pork and meat supply company.

With a total cooling capacity of 4 MW (1,137 TR), it is the largest transcritical CO₂ refrigeration system installed globally.

Previously, the world's largest transcritical CO₂ system was installed at a food processing plant in 2017 for Staay Food Group, a fruit and vegetables production and supply company based in the Netherlands.

However, Hannaford, a New England food retailer, is opening a distribution center near Albany, N.Y., in July that is expected to have a larger capacity that that used by the Yosemite plant.

Yosemite supplies its products mainly to supermarkets and restaurants in Sacramento, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles.

The company recently relocated and expanded to the city of Stockton, where it opened a new 200,000-ft² (18,580 m²) meat processing facility.

It is here where five transcritical CO₂ refrigeration racks power the cooling needs for the facility's quick chiller, process water chiller and cold/freezer rooms.

The system also employs heat reclaim to produce process hot water.

In order to mitigate reductions in energy efficiency due to the plant's location  in central California, where ambient temperatures can be high, the system uses adiabatic condensers and parallel compression.

The transcritical CO₂ system was manufactured and supplied by CRS, a Johannesburg, South Africa-based OEM.

CRS has been designing and manufacturing CO₂ systems for commercial and industrial end users in South Africa as well as internationally, for more than 10 years.

Installation and commissioning was provided by CoolSys.

Michael Lau from Yosemite Foods and Bryan Beitler from CoolSys presented information on the installation during ATMOsphere America 2019, held June 17-19 in Atlanta, Ga.