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

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.