In a cold-storage warehouse or a food plant, refrigeration is usually the single largest electrical load in the building — and the one where control strategy, not equipment, holds most of the recoverable saving. Of thirteen Canadian competitors reviewed, one listed industrial refrigeration as an expertise and none explained it.
A refrigeration plant spends electricity lifting heat from a cold space to a warm one, and the cost of doing that rises steeply with the temperature difference it has to work across. Almost every worthwhile measure is therefore about narrowing that gap, or about not putting heat into the cold space in the first place.
A compressor replacement is a large capital decision justified against the plant's current operating conditions. Correct the head pressure, the condenser control and the defrost strategy first, and the operating conditions change — which frequently changes the size of machine the plant needs, and occasionally removes the need for it. Buying first and optimising afterwards means paying for capacity to overcome a control fault.
IESO's Existing Building Commissioning programme requires a minimum 750,000 kWh of annual electricity consumption excluding industrial and manufacturing process load. In a refrigerated facility the process load is most of the bill, so a site that looks comfortably over the threshold can fall under it once the calculation is done properly. That separation has to happen before an application, not during one. See the eligibility gates.
For the refrigeration savings themselves, XLerate is usually the right route where anticipated savings clear 600 MWh a year: feasibility cost-shared at 50%, $300/MWh up to 75% of eligible costs, baseline measured before any change, and payment after the M&V report is approved. Verified 3 October 2026 — sources on the programme index.
We are not a refrigeration contractor and we sell no plant, controls or service agreements. Safety, code and mechanical integrity work on ammonia and other refrigerant systems belongs to the engineers and contractors qualified for it, and we refer rather than claim. Our scope is energy: measure it, explain it, rank what to change, and verify it afterwards.
No measure that puts product at risk belongs in the report, and product temperature requirements are a constraint we take from you rather than optimise against. Where a saving depends on relaxing a temperature, the report says so explicitly and leaves the decision where it belongs.
Not for the energy analysis. It changes who may do physical work on the system, and it means the site has safety obligations that sit outside our scope entirely. We work alongside whoever holds that responsibility.
Then ask for the logged data and the head-pressure strategy in writing. A service contractor is paid to keep the plant running, which is a different objective from keeping it cheap, and the two diverge most clearly on head pressure.
Related
Request a proposal
A compliance deadline, an incentive application, a financing requirement, or a capital plan. Tell us which, and we will tell you what you need and what it will cost — as a fixed fee, before any work starts.
If you do not need an audit, we will say so.