Freely available cold store energy models

User friendly, free, spreadsheet based numerical models were developed for the ICE-E (Improving Cold storage Equipment in Europe) project. These models were developed to enable end users to simply calculate how to save cold store energy. Two models were developed; these were called the ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ models. The ‘simple’ model predicts the steady state energy usage. For the ‘complex’ model, weather data are imported and the energy is calculated every day, such that yearly energy consumption is predicted. The ‘complex’ model also offers the ability for the daily heat loads to be exported and imported into Pack Calculation, a model developed by IPU Technology Development (Denmark). This model allows a more sophisticated refrigeration prediction to be made than the ‘simple’ model allows. The ‘simple’ model was compared with metered energy readings from a privately owned small cold store located in Northern Italy and shown to be accurate to 10%.