CryoHub is a European Union-funded project to develop and investigate the potential of large-scale cryogenic energy storage at refrigerated warehouses and food factories.
The CryoHub project team visited the Frigologix site in Lommel, Belgium recently. This site, co-located with the Farm Frites potato processing plant, includes an existing large cold storage facility, a new 4,000-square-meter facility under construction and an industrial operational anaerobic digester run by Bio Energy.
Reinier van Elderen, owner and managing director of Frigologix, who also owns two logistic service providers in frozen and chilled food in Belgium and France, said, “We were very pleased to host the visit of the CryoHub team at our site in Lommel and to show them around the site. We are very keen to explore how we might work with this key innovative research project. We share common goals of reducing energy demand, and one important way to do this is to be able to store energy at times of surplus, thus cutting costs and importantly reducing carbon emissions.”
Judith Evans, project co-ordinator and professor with London South Bank University, said, “We are grateful to Frigologix for hosting this visit and for showing us around their plant and sharing their plans for the future. The unique combination of food processing, storage and energy generation would make this an ideal site to demonstrate the unique CryoHub technology under development as part of the project, and we will be following up on this possibility with Reinier and his team in the future.”
Finding a suitable technology demonstrator site is one of the key stages of development for the CryoHub project.
CryoHub technology is based on storing renewable energy as a cryogenic liquid—in this case, liquid air. This cryogen is then boiled at very low temperatures to generate electricity for on-site use or feeding the power grid during peak demand periods. The cooling effect of boiling the cryogen is used to refrigerate industrial facilities.
The project which started in April 2016 and runs for four years, has been financed from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program and is being managed by a team of 14 organizations from the United Kingdom, Belgium, Bulgaria, France and Spain.
For more information, see www.cryohub.eu.
