Cooling Convenience Stores

Maverick convenience stores have 280 locations in the western United States. Businesses like these struggle with energy efficiency due to the large HVAC systems they must run constantly – and due to the opening and closing of doors, the temperature in the stores fluctuates greatly.

Another drain of energy are the refrigeration units that help keep drinks and other perishable items at the correct temperature. Of course, these units must also run on a constant basis.

EET conducted a project on three of these stores to show the effectiveness of implementing technology into the HVAC and refrigeration systems – known now as CryoGenX4.

The goal of the project was as follows:

• Ability of the equipment to better satisfy fluctuating store and refrigeration loads
• Produce additional cooling redundancy at no extra cost or interruption to store operations
• Improve cooling equipment efficiency, lowering cost to produce each ton of cooling required
• Restore thermal efficiency, allowing cooling equipment to achieve thermostat set points faster
• Reduce unscheduled maintenance issues and extend equipment life by 20% or more
• Reduce overall energy consumption and peak demand charges (KVA)

Validation Results

The results for the three stores involved in the project using investment grade kWh meters were as follows:

• Energy Reduction- 10.2%
• Demand Reduction- 8.3%
• Lifetime Return on Investment 579%

Following this validation pilot, it was deployed in 280 convenience store locations.

Investment grade kWh meter results: