Resource energy efficiency measures for retail sector in Azerbaijan

Abstract: The thesis work is part of a larger project financed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and awarded by RINA Consulting S.p.A.. Azeri Retail will receive the loan from EBRD in order to refurbish its six new acquisitions in Baku, Azerbaijan. Azeri Retail considers the current Fresco format store a good technological and structural level, therefore Azeri Retail would like to replicate this state also for the new acquisitions. The thesis objective is to understand and analyse the current energy efficiency state and consequently propose some resource efficiency measures in order to replicate this new format for the new acquisitions to have a lower carbon footprint compared to the existing supermarkets belonging to the same brand. The thesis project is an energy audit comprising analysis of historical data, site visit to current Azeri Retail’s stores and consequent proposal of energy saving measures to be applied to the new acquisitions. In order to do this, three case studies have been developed: ATL, Project and REM. The first step has been the literature review about the energy utilization and carbon footprint of the retails sector, past energy audits, current and future policy framework in Azerbaijan. During this phase, it turned out that Azerbaijan doesn’t have a dedicated law for energy efficiency and therefore the construction phase doesn’t consider energy efficiency a primary target. Furthermore, in average the refrigerators represent the 40% of the total energy consumption of the supermarket. The site visit in Baku highlighted huge differences between the two brands’ buildings owned by Azeri Retail: Fresco brand belongs to high structural and technological level supermarkets, while Sebet doesn’t have any insulation on the envelope and the technical equipment is rather old. Microsoft Excel have been used in order to create the tool to perform the calculations. The thermal losses considered are the transmission losses, due to the building envelope, and the ventilation losses, due to the temperature difference between the exhaust indoor air and outdoor air. The internal gains are included in the model, in particular occupancy and solar loads. Furthermore, every case study considers different technical equipment according to what it is representing. All three built case studies refer to the geometry of the Fresco 2 building, since the comparison is more valuable if the buildings considered have similar geometry and activity inside. The ultimate aim of the modelling phase is to achieve good savings through measures in the REM case, since it is supposed to represent a useful list of saving measures to carry out during the actual refurbishment of the new stores. The measures proposed are: refurbishment of the envelope, purchase of a heat recovery heat exchanger, the exploitation of daylight through solar tubes and installation of LED bulbs, the refurbishment of cold rooms and the installation of double air curtains in the open refrigerated display cabinets. Great and positive results have been achieved during the modelling phase: ➢ Fresco stores can show very good structural properties and technological equipment and for this reason, each saving measures is additional to the already existing Fresco’s buildings status. ➢ Although Fresco stores’ buildings are better than Sebet stores’ ones and better than average practice in Azerbaijan, huge savings have been identified and this means that the new acquisitions could perform even better than the existing ones, mostly considering medium-low cost measures. The report closes with the overall comparison between the three case studies’ energy consumption and international benchmarks about food driven retails.