Aggreko says process manufacturers are struggling to line up cooling upgrades with tighter refrigerant rules, as ageing assets, volatile budgets, and a looming compliance shift combine to make even routine replacement decisions harder than they should be.
The company’s latest survey of 334 UK manufacturing managers at businesses with turnover above £50 million found that 94% believe F-gas legislation will have a moderate or major impact on their ability to maintain and upgrade cooling equipment, while 97% say they are already facing difficulties upgrading systems to meet stricter environmental requirements. Knowledge gaps, the cost of replacement, and limited visibility on alternative technologies were identified as the main barriers.
Those findings land just as Great Britain is consulting on a steeper hydrofluorocarbon phasedown, with proposals to move beyond the current 79% reduction target for 2030 and towards a 98.6% cut by 2048. For plant managers running old chillers and process cooling assets, that shifts refrigerant compliance from a future procurement issue to a near-term operational one. Equipment that is still limping through service life can quickly become more exposed when gas availability tightens, heat loads rise, or an unplanned outage forces a hurried replacement.
Chris Smith, Head of Temperature Control at Aggreko UK, said the survey showed manufacturers were being squeezed between older infrastructure and tougher environmental rules. The broader report also points to rising concern about heatwaves, high replacement rates, and the risk of unplanned downtime — all familiar pressures in temperature-sensitive production, but harder to absorb when capex is constrained and site teams are asked to improve resilience at the same time.
Aggreko is using the findings to push flexible procurement models, including temporary cooling, as a way to trial alternative plant configurations without immediate capital spend. Whether that becomes a bridge to permanent replacement or a longer-running operating model, the survey suggests the sector’s cooling problem is now tied as closely to regulation and finance as it is to engineering. Download the report here.
