by Brianna Crandall — April 24, 2015—Axiom Exergy, innovator of behind-the-meter energy storage systems for large supermarkets and food distribution facilities, announced the availability of its breakthrough energy storage and backup cooling technology on April 22.
TIR is intended to catalyze strong laboratory-industry relationships that will lead to high-impact collaborative research and development (R&D).(Click on image to enlarge)
The Refrigeration Battery solves a major technical problem that businesses with high refrigeration loads have been unable to address until now: the inability to actively manage unintelligent refrigeration systems that use more than 50 percent of the energy in a typical supermarket, explains Axiom Exergy. The Refrigeration Battery enables these facilities to “store cooling” for later use, transforming their refrigeration systems into large-scale, cloud-connected, smart energy storage resources.
When the Refrigeration Battery is discharging, a supermarket’s power-hungry refrigeration compressors and condensers can be shut down, reducing the facility’s peak demand by up to 40 percent. Additionally, the Refrigeration Battery can provide backup refrigeration for 6-12 hours, protecting supermarkets from business interruption risk and significant food spoilage costs due to power outages.
“Supermarkets and cold-storage facilities must keep perishable food at a constant temperature around the clock, which means they must run power-hungry refrigeration equipment even when electricity prices skyrocket during the peak hours of the afternoon. Until now, this has been a huge, unavoidable cost that erodes their razor-thin profit margins—that’s where we come in,” said Amrit Robbins, president of Axiom Exergy.
“Our technology offers a significantly lower installed cost than anything else on the market, a system lifespan of 30 years—many times longer than traditional batteries—and the ability to shift multiple hours of cooling baseload. We believe we are the only viable energy storage solution for facilities that depend on refrigeration, and we’re eager to prove it.”
When the Battery is discharging, a supermarket’s power-hungry refrigeration compressors and condensers can be shut down, reducing the facility’s peak demand by up to 40%.(Click on image to enlarge)
How it works
The Refrigeration Battery stores refrigeration by freezing a tank of water with common additives at night when electricity is inexpensive. Then, it uses the frozen tanks to provide cooling during afternoon peak hours when electricity is expensive, enabling compressors and condensers to be turned off.
The Refrigeration Battery is a non-invasive, “plug-and-play” retrofit that does not require modifications to existing refrigeration systems.
The new product offers a rapid payback because supermarkets already own the most expensive component: their existing refrigeration system. This approach drives down the total system cost, explains the company. It is designed to be highly flexible so that multisite rollouts can be completed seamlessly across a wide variety of facilities.
“The refrigeration industry has been trying to solve the problem of ever-increasing refrigeration energy costs for a long time,” said Pete Cuneo, the national facility systems manager for a major supermarket chain. “It looks like Axiom Exergy has finally cracked the nut and potentially even solved a bigger problem—low-cost backup cooling. The Refrigeration Battery represents a major advancement in an industry that hasn’t changed much in decades.”
Axiom Exergy won the “Venture Capitalists” Choice award from among 350+ companies that participated in the international 2014 Cleantech Open Accelerator. The company also won the pitch competition at the recent 2015 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington DC. In addition, the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) recently vetted the company’s technical and economic models.
Axiom Exergy is an energy storage company focused on making the world’s energy systems smarter and more efficient. Its team has deep expertise in supermarket energy management, thermal energy systems engineering, hardware development, and product commercialization. Axiom Exergy provides its customers with turnkey energy management solutions that reduce operational costs and business risk. Axiom Exergy also offers no-money-down financing so that its customers can save more than they pay from day one.
