Press Release 14 June 2018
The EU CryoHub project is delighted to announce that Frigologix, one of the leading cold chain specialists in France and in Belgium has joined the project as an industrial partner and has agreed to become the site for the CryoHub technology demonstrator installation.
“Frigologix is an ideal partner for this project due to their commitment to constantly investigating new ways to optimise energy use in the cold chain.” Commented Project Manager, Prof Judith Evans.
Upon joining the CryoHub project, Reinier van Elderen, Director of Frigologix said: “Energy is one of our main cost drivers. This combined with our vision to leave a cleaner world for the next generation, made us decide to give energy and our energy consumption a lot of attention over the last years. We believe that the joint effort of universities, businesses and the government are needed to develop new break-through technologies also on our field of working. This is why we joined the CryoHub project. Our interest in energy matters makes it an easy choice to join the project.”
Frigologix’s environmental credentials are impressive. It started as a family business around 20 years ago and now provides logistic services for fresh and frozen food for multinational companies like Farm Frites, McCain and IGLO as well as for local companies. Their site receives over a hundred incoming and outgoing refrigerated vehicles per day. Frigologix have a proven commitment to buying green energy - in 2011 they installed 4.200 solar panels (nearly 1 Megawatt). Together with one of their biggest clients they operate a cogeneration plant and are working on developing a local smart grid. In 2015 Frigologix were awarded a “Lean & Green” STAR for reaching a reduction of 20% energy consumption. They are also working on a project to establish a Sustainability index for the logistic industry.
The CryoHub project which commenced 2016, will investigate and extend the potential for large-scale Cryogenic Energy Storage. It is a forty-two month EU co-funded project under the Horizon 2020 programme and includes a team of 14 partner organisations from 5 EU countries. See www.cryohub.eu for information about the partners, future workshops and to register for regular updates.
How CryoHub works
An important effect of generating power from liquid air is the ability to absorb heat at low temperatures. This is what a cold store does and therefore there appears synergy between cold store warehouse facilities and cryogenic energy storage. Pure atmospheric air can be liquefied by employing renewable energy and then stored and used to generate electricity (via a turbine) at periods of peak grid demand. At the same time, refrigerated facilities can be cooled and waste heat can eventually be recovered to improve the efficiency of the cryogenic expansion process. The success of such technologies to date has been rather limited due to poor round trip efficiency (ratio of energy out to energy in) and unrecovered energy losses. The CryoHub project explores the potential to maximise efficiencies by regenerating energy from the refrigeration plants of food storage warehouses.
