Putting Refrigeration Energy and Maintenance in Focus
“Refrigeration can account for 60-70% of a store’s total energy consumption - and energy alone can be 15% of each store’s operating budget.”
Millions spent on energy and maintenance
Companies in the retail grocery space spend millions of dollars on maintenance and energy bills every year. Not only are these some of a store’s largest line items, they represent an often overlooked opportunity to reduce risk, increase resilience, and add value across the board. As environmental concerns grow more urgent, technician shortages grow more acute, and new technologies emerge, companies must respond to these shifts with a plan for action.
Refrigeration energy and maintenance costs make up a significant portion of your portfolio’s operating budget. Refrigeration can use 70% of a store's total energy footprint - and energy expenses can account for 15% of each store’s operating budget. That’s not even considering the cost of retaining an internal refrigeration maintenance team or getting into long term contracts with 3rd party providers.
Impacts on operations
Beyond their impacts on the bottom line, refrigeration monitoring, energy, and maintenance can be a distraction from your company’s higher level mission and vision. It’s hard to be a category leader when your teams are dealing with reactive alarms day in and day out. You can learn more about the hidden costs of refrigeration outages in a previous post.
Top executives need to keep a pulse on overall operational excellence without getting bogged down in the day-to-day tasks of techs and program managers. It’s often the case that stores already have systems in place that are “working,” and that seems “good enough” at first glance.
However, opportunities exist for enormous efficiency gains with proper refrigeration management. Real value is being left on the table at both the store and portfolio level. So what are some of the options available to executives today?
Simply by incorporating a new set of overlay apps for your refrigeration systems, you can reduce operational costs and headaches significantly, freeing up staff time to focus on higher value challenges.
New apps make management easy
Axiom Cloud offers apps designed to free up staff time, save you money on energy and maintenance, enhance store sustainability, and increase the value of your organization’s refrigeration systems. For those unfamiliar, we cover how each app can impact your bottom line in a previous blog post.
Facilities Analyzer gives you a powerful 30,000 foot view of your entire portfolio, allowing you to spot trends and identify areas for efficiency gains. The app also helps predict problems before they even occur.
Virtual Technician takes the failure prediction to the next level, and proactively and preemptively fixes problems with refrigeration systems. In many cases, Virtual Technician eliminates the need for a tech to visit the site. In cases where a truck roll does need to happen, staff are informed with the exact information they need to find and fix problems efficiently.
Virtual Battery turns existing refrigeration systems into intelligent thermal energy storage - generating financial benefits for stores, with zero impact on food safety. We describe the app in greater depth, and how it both reduces energy bills and generates new revenue, in this blog post.
“Cooling consumes 25-30% of electricity globally, and it is responsible for 8% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.”
Enhanced Sustainability
Corporate social responsibility is more than a buzzword today. Sustainability programs are becoming table stakes for many companies - consumers expect real and concerted action to reduce environmental impacts. This includes energy efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Cooling itself is both a culprit and area of opportunity for enhanced sustainability. Cooling consumes 25-30% of electricity globally, and it is responsible for 8% of worldwide GHG emissions.
In addition to making refrigeration management easier and more efficient, Axiom Cloud apps can improve sustainability metrics and help organizations achieve their goals related to Scope 1 (direct) and Scope 2 (indirect) emissions. For
Virtual Technician identifies slow refrigerant leaks - a major source of Scope 1 greenhouse gas emissions - that often go undetected by PPM sensors. For a specific example, check out our latest case study to see how Virtual Technician caught a refrigerant leak at a Grocery Outlet store in California. Through continuous commissioning, the app also reduces indirect Scope 2 emissions by making refrigeration systems more efficient. One example of this is the continuous monitoring of floating suction pressure controls.
With load shifting and demand response, Virtual Battery reduces Scope 2 emissions and enables higher penetration of renewable energy on the grid. When one or more of Axiom’s apps are installed, major gains can be made towards your sustainability efforts.
It matters to the C-suite
By leveraging the existing sensors and controllers at your stores in new ways, you’ll see how easy it is to achieve benefits like better performance, reduced risk, increased systemic resilience, and lower emissions. These benefits accrue directly toward the goals the C-suite cares about.
Are you doing everything you can to propel your portfolio forward? We’d love to share specific examples of how we’ve helped organizations like yours get on track to meet their goals. Send us a note to get the conversation started!
Turner is a Lead Sales Engineer at Axiom Cloud.
Axiom Cloud’s mission is to use software and automation to transform how the world’s cooling systems are powered, operated, and maintained, in order to generate significant climate and financial impact. Axiom’s team of refrigeration experts, data scientists, energy nerds, and software developers solves retail grocery’s biggest energy and maintenance challenges by layering intelligence onto their existing refrigeration systems. If you’re interested in learning more about our mission or our apps for commercial refrigeration, please contact us today.