Carrier Corp., a unit of United Technologies Corp. (NYSE:UTX), won the prestigious Environmental Pioneer award in the Refrigeration category at the 2008 Cooling Industry Awards. The awards were presented Oct. 1 during a gala event at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London.
First presented in 2004 by RAC (Refrigeration and Air Conditioning) Magazine, the Cooling Industry awards are the premier awards for the refrigeration and air-conditioning industry in the UK. The awards recognize companies that demonstrate environmental leadership and encourage the rest of the industry to do so. The judges base their selection on entries that have shown particularly strong leadership, vision, and have the potential for wider adoption.
"This award recognizes our ground-breaking work across Europe with carbon dioxide (CO2) retail systems, particularly transcritical and environmental solutions," said Jim Whelan, Carrier Commercial Refrigeration regional sales director. "The UK has worked hard to stimulate a strong customer desire to develop CO2 in the local market. We now need to capitalize on the opportunities we have in the marketplace."
Among its claims to pioneering this technology is Carrier Commercial Refrigeration's installation of the largest transcritical CO2 refrigeration system in the world. Carrier equipment cools food in a hypermarket in Northern Germany, where three high temperature (HT) packs with total capacity of 670 kW and two low temperature (LT) packs with capacity of 130 kW were installed.
Carrier has also pioneered a two-step technology with the refrigerant, which allows the pressure on the supermarket shop floor to be kept at reasonable levels (around 40 bar) with only the plant areas requiring higher pressures. And here in the UK, Carrier has completed the first transcritical store based on water cooling, at Sainsbury's in Greenwich, converting the store to CO2 with only 10 days' shutdown.
Carrier Commercial Refrigeration plans to build on its experience in retail - from convenience stores to hypermarkets - when it begins full-scale production of these systems next year. Benoît Olsommer, CO2 program manager said, "This award recognizes the cross-divisional CO2OLTEC® program team's outstanding accomplishments in the development and application of state-of-the-art, all-CO2, environmentally conscious, turnkey systems for commercial refrigeration. CO2OLTEC will be launched early next year in select countries."
The company will launch integrated solutions that will make CO2 systems attractive even in warmer climates, while current developments in Booster systems will reduce energy consumption, complexity and cost for combined LT and HT systems.
Judges for the awards said, "Carrier Commercial Refrigeration has set the pace in developing CO2 systems for supermarkets across Europe."
