GCCE: Carnot up to eight transcritical installations in U.S. industrial plants

Carnot Refrigeration, the Quebec-based OEM that helped pioneer the use of transcritical CO₂ refrigeration in Canadian supermarkets, has installed transcritical systems at eight industrial locations, reflecting the growth of CO₂ in the sector, according to Marc-André Lesmerises, CEO of Carnot.

The installations, done over the past 1.5 years, include cold-storage and food processing facilities such as a Henningsen Cold Storage facility in Grandview, Wash.; a Hannaford food retail warehouse in Albany, N.Y.; a U.S. Cold Storage plant in Turlock, Calif.; a Mama LaRosa dough-processing plant in Michigan; and a seafood processing plant.

“[Transcritical CO₂] is definitely the future long-lasting solution” for industrial facilities, said Lesmerises during an interview at Carnot’s booth at the Global Cold Chain Expo, which is taking place June 10-12 at McCormick Place in Chicago. “When people try it, they understand that.”

Carnot has more than eight industrial installations of transcritical CO₂ refrigeration in Canada, but he could not specify the number.

A number of the industrial transcritical installations are retrofits of existing facilities. One example is the Hannaford warehouse, an 800,000-ft2 facility, which recently installed one of the largest transcritical CO₂ systems in the world, Lesmerises said. Carnot has delivered four racks, each with up to 14 50-HP compressors. “We are starting up one of the racks soon.” 

The transcritical CO₂ systems at Hannaford and US Cold Storage use adiabatic condensers and ejectors. “With that you avoid so much of the energy penalty of CO₂,” Lesmerises said, adding that with Carnot’s ejector design parallel compression is not necessarily required.

Carnot delivered the second rack to the US Cold Storage facility two weeks ago; PermaCold Engineering, the refrigeration contractor, at the Henningsen CO₂ facility, is also the contractor at the US Cold Storage site.