Commercial, professional and domestic refrigeration equipment efficiency in the UK: current and future trends.

In the UK food cold-chain refrigeration accounted for 28.6 TWh/a of electrical energy consumption in 2019, of which 24.4 TWh was from commercial, professional and household refrigeration. Using the most recent UK projections of energy consumption for domestic, professional and commercial refrigeration, this work found that UK Government projections for domestic refrigeration are not realistic and should be adjusted to reflect that current UK sales of domestic refrigerators have higher energy consumptions than currently assumed. To drive energy improvements in professional refrigeration will require removing the 3 worst performing classes from energy labelling. Banning open fronted supermarket cabinets and/or removing the last 3 tiers of the energy label, would bring supermarket commercial refrigeration in line with current projections, but only if it happened immediately. For other commercial refrigeration equipment (beverage coolers and ice cream freezers) a more gradual approach of removing labels is suggested to be appropriate.