Chinese Factories Want to Make Climate-Friendly Air Conditioners. A US Company Is Blocking Them
Underwriters Laboratories enacted “safety” standards limiting the use of propane refrigerants. The U.N. suggests the real beneficiary may be the U.S. chemical industry.
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Stretching the length of a football field, the assembly line in Wuhu was retooled in 2016 to produce hundreds of thousands of climate-friendly air conditioners per year, funded with money from the United Nations. The goal was to help reduce a class of key climate super-pollutants.
Air conditioners now use fluorinated chemical refrigerants. While each air conditioner contains only a small amount of refrigerant, the chemicals eventually make their way into the atmosphere, as the devices slowly leak or are destroyed at the end of their useful life. Those emissions add up and wreak havoc. As greenhouse gases they are hundreds to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.
The U.N. money allowed Midea and other manufacturers across China to use propane as a refrigerant instead, a climate- and ozone-friendly hydrocarbon alternative that is also less expensive.
The Environmental Protection Agency approved its use in air conditioners in 2015. Propane is 3.3 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, giving it an “ultra-low” global warming potential, relative to other refrigerants.
But an Inside Climate News investigation found that those U.N. efforts to encourage propane-cooled air conditioners have largely been stymied by safety standards set by Underwriters Laboratories, now known as “UL” in the United States, a private company that provides independent safety certifications for thousands of consumer products.
The standards were devised to protect profits for the U.S. chemical industry, environmentalists in the U.S. and Europe, and Chinese manufacturers told Inside Climate News.
In the investigation, which included reviews of U.N. documents and peer reviewed studies, environmentalists, manufacturers and other experts said in interviews that there was little evidence that a fire risk in propane air conditioning units merited a reduction in the allowable quantity of the gas from 1 kilogram to 114 grams, as UL determined when it enacted a strict new standard in July 2015, just months after the EPA green-lighted propane’s use.
While UL standards are technically voluntary, they hold enormous sway over what products are sold in the United States. If a product does not meet UL safety standards, the manufacturer could be held liable for damages if anything were to go wrong.
“Safety is just an excuse,” said one Chinese industry expert who asked not to be quoted by name, voicing similar concerns to that of a 2017 report by the Technology and Economic Assessment Panel of the United Nations Environment Programme.
“The United States does not want hydrocarbon refrigerants to be used prematurely in the United States,” he said. “It hopes to buy some time for its fluorochemical companies to try new alternatives.”
Using propane instead of fluorinated refrigerants, explained Daniel Colbourne, an independent refrigeration technology consultant, pulls “the rug from under the feet of the chemical industry” because propane is not patented and is much cheaper, more efficient and has a “negligible global warming impact.”
Project Drawdown, an international group of researchers that ranks potential climate solutions, lists reducing emissions of fluorinated refrigerants as one of the most important things that can be done to limit future warming, alongside building wind farms and installing solar power.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20122020/chinese-factories-air-conditioning-refrigerants/
