“The sky isn’t falling. There are plenty of options.” Those words from Rajan Rajendran, director of engineering services for Emerson Climate Technologies to an audience of supermarket engineers at the Food Marketing Institute Energy & Store Development Conference in September, represented a shift in thinking as compared with 20 or more years ago.
The phaseout of first CFCs and then HCFCs initially caused somewhat of a panic in the industry over alternatives — only to be favorably resolved with the wider use of HCFCs to replace CFCs, and then the introduction of HFCs for refrigeration and air conditioning applications.