IIR Working Group publishes Guidelines for Life Cycle Climate Performance

Available to download: Guidelines for Life Cycle Climate Performance

 

Evaluating the Life Cycle Climate Performance (LCCP) for refrigeration equipment is a necessity.

Focus is too often put on partial elements of the environmental impact of equipment, especially refrigerants, while the IIR has shown, for example, that all refrigeration equipment, air conditioning included, represent 17% of the global electricity consumption (see the 29^th IIR Informatory Note on The Role of Refrigeration in the Global Economy (November 2015), updated in 2019).

 

Following several meetings, including at the International Congress of Refrigeration (ICR2015) in Yokohama, Japan, in August 2015, the IIR Working Group (WG) has prepared guidelines on the Life Cycle Climate Performance (LCCP).

 

New: Guidelines for Life Cycle Climate Performance

Today, the importance of using comprehensive indicators to estimate real greenhouse gas emissions of systems over their lifetime has never been more critical.

This guide provides a harmonised method to calculate the LCCP for all types of stationary air conditioning, heat pumping and refrigeration systems. The process and assumptions with which LCCP should be approached are explored in-depth.

The guide offers designers, facility operators, manufacturers, and policy makers a way to effectively evaluate and compare the environmental impact of different systems over the course of their lifetimes.

 

 Download the Guidelines for Life Cycle Climate Performance on FRIDOC and see the calculation tool.

 

The Future of the LCCP WG

The future objectives of this WG, organised by Commission B1 (Thermodynamics & transfer processes), with the participation of Commissions B2 (Refrigerating equipment), E1 (Air conditioning) and E2 (Heat pumps, energy recovery), include:

• LCCP re-evaluation at equal system capacity
• Sensitivity studies aimed at reducing the complexity of different GWP refrigerants equations
• Expansion of sample calculations to other applications and regions
• End-user research.

 

What is the IIR Working Group on Life Cycle Climate Performance (LCCP) evaluation?

This IIR Working Group (WG) is designed to assess the merits of different methods for evaluating the Life Cycle Climate Performance (LCCP) for refrigerating systems environmental impact of refrigerants and to produce implementation protocols for these methods, for use by decision makers and refrigeration stakeholders.

Yunho Hwang, Vice-President of IIR Commission B1, is chairman of this WP which began in January 2012.

 

Interested in the activities of this working group? Contact Yunho Hwang (Chairman): yhhwang@umd.edu

 

About IIR Working Groups

IIR Working Groups operate on a temporary basis to bring together specialists in order to work on projects arising from current issues.

Their aim is to promote development, provide knowledge and give recommendations in these spheres.

In order to achieve these objectives, they hold conferences and workshops, write publications and provide recommendations.

Members of working groups are IIR members from industry, university and research-centre settings or are refrigeration practitioners.