ET24SWE0057 - High Speed Oven Energy Use Field Monitoring for the Commercial Foodservice Industry

Frontier Energy will conduct a field study, which will characterize the energy use of high-speed ovens (also known as rapid cook ovens) in the commercial foodservice industry. This is an emerging technology commonly found in cafes, airports, and commissaries. These ovens use a combination of a convection fan, a conduction hotplate, and a microwave to cook foods extremely quickly. Additionally, rapid cook ovens are ‘ventless’ and some operations are replacing gas-fired ovens with rapid cook ovens in an effort to decommission exhaust hoods. Because of this pattern, rapid cook ovens have potential to be a retrofit decarbonization technology. In recent years, manufacturers have begun to implement more efficient technologies such as better insulation, automatic setback modes and more sophisticated controls into these ovens, and there is a research need to evaluate the real-world energy savings of these technologies. Further, there exists no public repository of field data for rapid cook ovens, so it’s difficult to characterize their energy use and operating patterns, which would be necessary for publishing a measure package or designing a utility energy efficiency measure. This study would address this need and could address some of the barriers to adoption of more efficient rapid cook ovens, such as end user awareness of these energy savings opportunities. This study would independently submeter the energy usage of 10 rapid cook ovens in various foodservice facilities to identify savings opportunities and operating patterns. 

High-speed ovens are a rapidly growing appliance category, with high demand from customers and increasing interest among utility programs. However, the data needed to properly characterize high-speed oven current market usage and prospective energy savings potential when optimally integrated into a foodservice operation is still significantly lacking. To fill this data gap and develop a comprehensive outlook on the high-speed oven market in California, Frontier Energy generated data throughout this study through a mixture of market analysis and field data acquisition.  

Through stakeholder interviews, Frontier estimated a current inventory of about 23,000 high-speed ovens in the state of California, with projections for the market continuing to grow 10to 20 percent over the next two years. Through the combination of data collected at eleven field sites and laboratory testing results, Frontier estimated 28% energy savings when converting from a standard high-speed oven to an energy efficient high-speed oven, equivalent to 2,354 kilowatt-hours per year for each replaced unit or 5.4 terawatt-hours per year for all of California, assuming 10 percent of the existing high-speed oven inventory are older units ready for replacement. With an incremental measure cost of $2,979, Frontier estimates a return on investment of 4.2 years for a high-speed oven replacement. Culminating this data, Frontier developed a draft measure package with the criteria of cooking efficiency ≥ 39% and idle rate ≤ 1.00 kilowatts, which may be adopted by utility programs to realize the energy savings potential of high speed ovens.