Latent heat and cold storage: Correlation
Prices it moves with, and why
Latent heat stores use materials that melt and freeze, such as ice, paraffin waxes and salt hydrates, to hold heat or cold in a small volume. Costs depend on the phase-change material, its packaging and cooling demand.
No public price Latent heat and cold storage has no public monthly price series: Many materials and products; no single price series.What its price moves with
Ice tanks make cold at night with cheap power and cool buildings by day. Water is almost free, so the economics of ice storage depend on chiller efficiency and on electricity tariffs.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Paraffin waxes, a common phase-change material, are produced by oil refineries. Their cost follows crude oil and refinery output of lubricant base oils, from which the wax is separated, so wax prices track oil markets.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Fatty acids and their esters from vegetable oils serve as bio-based phase-change materials. Their prices follow palm and other vegetable oils, linking the cost of these cold stores to farm and food markets.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Salt hydrates, such as sodium sulphate or calcium chloride with water, are cheap phase-change materials for heating and cold chains. The salts are low cost, but they need additives to stop them separating.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Heat pumps and chillers charge many latent stores, letting them run when power is cheap. Store size and heat pump capacity are designed together, so the store lets a smaller machine meet peak demand.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.Buildings use phase-change boards and ice tanks to cut peak cooling demand and power bills. Demand for such storage grows with air conditioning, especially in hot countries such as India where cooling loads are rising fast.
Not enough overlapping price history to measure.How to read these numbers
Correlation of monthly changes (the number in the coloured pill) compares how much each price moved, month by month, since 2006 or the first month both series exist. It runs from −1 to +1: near +1 the two usually rise and fall in the same months, near 0 there is no link, and a negative number means they tend to move in opposite directions. Above 0.7 is strong, 0.4 to 0.7 moderate, 0.2 to 0.4 weak.
12-month changes compare year-on-year moves, which shows whether two prices share the same cycles even when the month-to-month noise differs.
Price function is a straight-line fit of the two prices on logarithmic scales: price ≈ k × (partner price)β. β is how much this price moves, in per cent, for a 1% move in the partner over the whole period, and R² is the share of the variation the fit explains. Two prices that both drift up with inflation can fit well without any real link, so read it together with the monthly correlation.
Lead or lag checks whether the monthly correlation is clearly higher when one price is shifted by 1 to 6 months.
Correlation is not cause. The reasons on each card explain the economic link; the numbers show how strongly it has shown up in prices. Proxy series are US producer price indexes or related prices and can blur the real link.
Data: World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet), October 2026; US Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price indexes, IMF primary commodity prices and US EIA prices via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, retrieved November 2026. Calculations by this site.