METRO opens second Russian CO₂ transcritical supermarket

Last Thursday (23 August), Germany-headquartered wholesale and food specialist METRO opened its second CO₂ transcritical store in Russia in Odintsovo, near Moscow, a month after opening its first in July 2018 in Aparinki, also near Moscow.

This is the third confirmed installation of a CO₂ transcritical system in a supermarket in Russia.

This second CO₂ transcritical store in the city of Odintsovo, in the administrative centre of Odintsovsky District in the region of Moscow Oblast, has a trading area of approximately 5,800 m² and is a little different from METRO’s first Russian transcritical CO₂ installation in Aparinki in July. 

For this store METRO decided to work with a different Russian contractor called LAND (as opposed to Ingenium, which it used for the first CO₂ transcritical store, based near St. Petersburg (in northern Russia, over 700 km from Moscow), according to Holger Guss, head of building services and engineering at METRO AG.  

Danfoss provided the monitoring controls again, while this time Dorin provided the CO₂ compressors for the LAND-manufactured transcritical rack and Swiss Frigo-Consulting was involved in the design of the project. The gas coolers are from Güntner and the refrigerated glassdoor cabinets are from Arneg, who provided 80 cabinets (with a total length of 200m and a display surface area of 560 sq.m approximatley. 

The latest Russian installation also features heat reclaim and parallel compression. 150 kW of reclaimed heat warms the store in the winter, according to Olaf Schulze, METRO AG’s director of energy management, investments and technical solutions.  

The cooling capacity of this second installation is a little lower, as the Odintsovo store is smaller than the Aparinki one. The system provides 73 kW of low-temperature cooling, 202 kW of medium-temperature cooling, and 260 kW of high-temperature cooling (built with a free cooling system).

METRO is planning to open more CO₂ transcritical stores in the Moscow area. “Solntsevo [will follow] in December […] with transcritical CO₂,” Schulze told R744.com.