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Well, believe it or not, 2024 is just about over. It’s been quite a busy year in the world of HVAC, manufacturing, and heat transfer, and we thought we’d run through a brief recap of some of this year’s biggest headlines before we officially turn the calendar to 2025.
2024 marked the final year that unit manufacturers could legally build and sell new units designed for R-410A, marking a substantial milestone in the EPA’s multi-year, tiered HFC phasedown effort.
Beginning January 1, 2025, the manufacture, sale, and import of new units designed for R-410A, a longtime HVAC industry workhorse, as well as several other HFC refrigerant and HFC refrigerant blends.
While many of those affected by this legislation have been preparing for several months if not years prior, much of that planning work was put into action in 2024. For the commercial HVAC industry, two primary replacement options emerged – R-454B and R-32, with many domestic OEMs opting for the former, and the latter being a popular choice in Asia as well as the US.
Among the more notable impacts of that transition was the fact that both R-32 and R-454B carry ASHRAE safety designations of A2L, meaning they’re classified as ‘mildly flammable.’ While the flame propagation potentials for both are effectively impossible in commercial heating and cooling conditions, the use of A2L refrigerants was a big change for many relative to the outgoing A1 refrigerants that many were used to. And, while the high-temp commercial HVAC sector was home to the bulk of industry discourse, low and medium-temp refrigeration markets were affected as well.
Another major concern for unit manufacturers and end users was the potential for performance disparity between 410A and its replacement options. Some took the phasedown milestone as an opportunity to reevaluate their unit designs, with some making changes to avoid potential performance loss. Others, though, have opted for direct drop-in replacements, viewing any performance loss potential as negligible, with some applications even offering the potential for improved performance.
While some practical implications from the transition may remain to be seen, the increasing proliferation of refrigerant options is likely here to stay, as the industry seeks out new substances to offer maximum performance and efficiency within regulation of the EPA’s mandate.
The potential for heat pump technologies’ viability for emerging and ‘nontraditional’ applications continued to be a hot topic in the industry in 2024. Building on the deluge of discourse in the past few years, industry players continue to push the envelope to learn the full potential of heat pump technologies.
One heat pump application that has been especially interesting is the use of heat pumps and CO2 for water heating. SRC has a number of customers exploring the viability of such equipment, several of which are either nearing or at production readiness.
We first saw these CO2 heat pump water heaters in brewery and dairy applications, during which heat rejected from storage tanks was captured using a CO2 heat exchanger, which was then routed to the facility’s hot water supply where it could be used for washdown or domestic water heating elsewhere in the facility.
In the years since, CO2 heat pumps and similar technologies have exploded in popularity, spurred in part by 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, which included substantial incentives for research and development of heating and cooling technologies, especially for electrification. Those incentives along with increasingly prohibitive natural gas legislation in some states likely mean that the heat pump market will continue to grow and evolve.
The artificial intelligence boom - and corresponding data center cooling industry - showed little sign of slowing down in 2024, as did the ecosystem of unit manufacturers, integrators, and component suppliers that support it. And, in our experience, there's substantial innovation happening in this exploding market as computing power continues to develop at a pace that has cooling technologies struggling to keep up.
In 2024, we saw an extremely wide spectrum of approaches to data center cooling. From massive water coils for rooftop units to small coils designed for installation on server racks themselves and everything in between, the data center cooling market continues to grow - both in diversity and scale. In a market that has changed monumentally over the past 10 years, we anticipate 2025 will see that dynamic persist, as AI drives the need for innovative approaches to cooling data centers and other computing equipment.
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