End User
Vincent van Dijk
Alfard Clerc
Fast forward to 2017, and Albert Heijn has 110 CO2 transcritical stores (including franchises) – about 10% of its total store portfolio. It is currently remodelling stores to CO2 transcritical systems at a rate of 60-80 per year. In adopting natural refrigerant systems, total cost of ownership (TCO) and life-cycle climate performance (LCCP) are important considerations for Albert Heijn. “We have the ambition to work faster, but it’s also about cost. The remodelling sequence is about 10 years, so that’s a very important consideration in speeding up towards going completely CO2 neutral,” van Dijk says. Nowhere is the extent of their ambition more obvious than at the brand new Albert Heijn XL in the small town of Purmerend, north of Amsterdam and just a short drive from Ahold Delhaize’s Spring 2017
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Accelerate Europe
Zaandam HQ. Self-styled as ‘Europe’s most sustainable supermarket’, a glance at the huge information panel on the wall in Purmerend makes it easy to see why. The Purmerend store is 100% CO2-neutral. 50% of the energy used in the Albert Heijn XL, Etos and Gall & Gall on site is provided by a combination of 700 solar panels (on the roof and sides of the building) and a combined heat and power (CHP) plant in the car park. The CHP is fired by biogas and provides in-store heating and electricity. “It’s very special. Normally we wouldn’t have any electricity production. When you get electricity from the grid, you lose more than 60% in distribution. With the CHP, you only lose 11%,” van Dijk explains. Albert Heijn’s use of fully closable refrigerator doors saves 25% of electricity
for cooling purposes. Smarter design of the fixed cabinets in Purmerend delivers another 10% saving on top of that. “The rack does all the cooling and the air conditioning. Above it, you also have absorption machines for the in-store air conditioning. We prepare the rack in advance, pack it up, drop it in and simply connect all the piping – then it’s ready to work!” van Dijk enthuses. The rack itself is a CO2 transcritical booster system with parallel compression (Bitzer). It is one of only a handful in Europe to use ejectors (Danfoss). An adiabatic gas and a dry-cooler on the roof complement the rack. The 6K evaporators alone deliver energy savings of 10% compared to the previous cabinets. The addition of the evaporators and design of the cabinets are the result of intensive collaboration with partners.