Cooling-as-a-Service Ammonia Installation at South African Dairy Factory

Case Study - Refrigeration / Industrial

Energy Partners Refrigeration (EPR), a South African cooling-as-a-service (CaaS) implementer, installed a 10MW two-stage ammonia system at South Africa’s largest dairy company, Clover, in 2022, and the performance has so far exceeded forecasts. The Queensburgh project was estimated to increase the refrigeration system’s COP by 30% compared to the original operation, but EPR has measured an efficiency improvement of nearly 40%.
Partners in the project also included BASE and the Clean Cooling Collaborative. The first phase of this project was completed in January 2022 without any downtime to the facility; the second phase was completed in June.
Clover has a 30% market share in the South African dairy industry. The company is currently consolidating and upgrading its manufacturing facilities, starting with its Queensburgh production center in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The refrigeration system at Queensburgh was using outdated technology and unable to face the new production load resulting from the consolidation of various facilities there, according to EPR. Its improvement constitutes the largest single CaaS investment EPR has made since adopting the servitization approach.
The system is operating within its contracted specifications and at 102% of its estimated load.
This two-stage ammonia system also features limited ice storage plus waste heat recovery for hot water. Energy Partners also installed a solar photovoltaic system, significantly reducing the operations cost – the solar installation provides 16% of all electricity used.
The plant has been designed to be expanded to 15,000kW in the future.

Energy Efficiency

Efficiency improvement of nearly 40% compared to the original operation.
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