Commercial and professional refrigeration products: promoting energy efficiency with legislation, empowered stakeholders and rebates

• January 31, 2016

Commercial and professional plug-in refrigerated cabinets use much more energy than household products. Saving potentials are huge but there are barriers to improving efficiency. Standardised declaration of energy consumption does not exist; this makes comparing the electricity costs of products impossible.

Coming EU legislation will overcome this lack of basic information. How effective the new legislation will be depends on the outcome of the ongoing draft and revision process. A rebate programme for efficient refrigerated cabinets in Switzerland and the European Horizon 2020 project “ProCold” work to empower market participants and overcome barriers to developing efficiency.

Based on estimates for the year 2016, plug-in commercial and professional refrigerated cabinets use half as much energy compared to household refrigerators and freezers in the EU, even though there are 12 times less commercial / professional cabinets than household products (commercial / professional: >25 million units and >43 TWh/year1 [1], household: 304 million units and 84 TWh/year [2]).

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