Leading UK experts have accused the EU of being ‘blinkered’ by ambition in their F-gas revision proposals, pushing for the UK to take a more pragmatic approach. This is Part 2 of a two-part article.
Graeme Fox, current IoR president, director of technical at BESA and head of F-gas certification body REFCOM, spoke at a recent RAC magazine F-Gas Question Time, accusing the European Commission of misguided thinking and the European Parliament of being blinkered by ambition. He said the Commission had an unwillingness to actually discuss the practical implications of their proposals.
Assumptions
Ray Gluckman questioned the Commission’s analysis report on which the proposals are based. “They haven’t analysed energy properly,” he claimed. “They’ve made sweeping assumptions that propane can be equally efficient to an HFC.”
In the case of the proposed bans on air conditioning and heat pump units in the under 12kW category, Gluckman maintained that they had only analysed R410A, R32 and propane. “They didn’t analyse any other gases. They didn’t analyse an HFO blend with GWP under 150 for example. Additionally, the assumptions in the analysis report imply that over half the market from January of next year in the under 12kW, air to air split market – which is a massive market – is going to be on propane by next January and 90% of it by January 2025.”
With less than 1% of that market on propane this year, Gluckman described the assumption that the switch could be made in such a short time frame as ‘unreal’.
“The likelihood is that manufacturers will rush to put things on the market. They won’t have time to optimise and the efficiency will drop. As soon as the efficiency drops, you’re going to get more greenhouse gas emissions from the extra energy consumption than you’re saving from a little bit of HFC. And that is particularly true about heat pumps. If we do anything to slow the rollout of heat pumps we will massively increase the amount of fossil fuel emissions over the next say five to 10 years.”
Training
Training, or a lack of it, was another worry, particularly when it came to the handling of flammable A3 refrigerants like propane which are currently unregulated under F-gas.
“Don’t forget that the massive rollout of propane systems is a rollout of millions of heat pumps and split systems that are completely unregulated because they are out of scope of the regulations, which means technically, you don’t have to have any qualifications,” Fox said. “You don’t have to have any registration. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can install a propane split system under law. And that’s just crazy!”
Fox also insisted that while hydrocarbon training and flammable training courses are available and being taken up in the UK, this was not the case in much of Europe. “A lot of the countries across Europe haven’t even created their flammable training courses yet, let alone set up training centres to deliver them. So, there are literally hundreds of thousands of technicians and AC and fridge engineers right across Europe, who are already handling, or will be handling, flammable refrigerants in the very near future who have had zero training in the implications of refrigerants and that’s clearly not a safe prospect.”
Fox revealed that in talks with DEFRA over the Great Britain regulations he has been pushing for the inclusion of all refrigerants in the regulation. Insisting that they all have global warming implications, he said: “Just by taking the word fluorinated out of the regulations, we actually include every single refrigerant, except ammonia. And it’s a really simple process, because everything, even CO2, is a greenhouse gas. It just becomes a greenhouse gas emissions regulation. It’s a really simple process.”
A UK government response is due towards the end of this year but new F-gas regulations for Great Britain are not likely to come in until 2025.