Radisson Blu: Achieving Energy Efficiency in Hotels

The Radisson Hotel at East Midlands Airport is a 218 bedroom hotel featuring extensive conference facilities, swimming pool and leisure facilities. Built to BREEAM standards, it’s considered one of the greenest hotels in the UK. It earned the “eco-hotel” label due to sustainable construction and other green practices.

Energy efficiency was part of the design and construction so the hotel also boasts a 285kW bio-oil CHP (Combined Heat and Power) system. It generates enough electrical power to support the hotel, while converting waste heat as a primary source of heating and cooling for the hotel. This ‘green’ CHP plant operates on waste bio-oil that qualified for the maximum number of ROC’s (Renewable Obligation Certificates) under the government’s renewables scheme at the time.

However, despite those sustainable credentials for an energy efficient hotel, the hotel’s performance wasn’t as expected. The operating costs, and in particular the utility costs, did not reflect the operation of such a green building.   

The Energy Challenge: Identifying Inefficiencies  

Hotel operators faced a key issue: improving efficiency without a clear performance baseline. Teething issues like this often occur within the first few months or even years of a building’s life that may not be obvious at the time handover takes place.   

Two years after the hotel opened, Spacewell Energy’s partner Optimised Buildings was commissioned to optimize the operation of HVAC, the BeMS (Building energy Management System), absorption chiller and CHP. They also provided a managed service for overall energy management of the hotel. It was soon evident that some fundamental challenges lay ahead.    

While the individual systems mentioned above were commissioned, they were not optimized to operate together or adapted for seasonal change.

The Solution for an Energy Efficient Hotel

1. The first step was to monitor energy consumption through the extensive submetering that was installed into the hotel.  These meters were already linked into the Trend BeMS which minimized the integration requirements. The half-hourly data was logged and ‘pushed’ to Spacewell Energy. This created the transparency and baseline data to effectively monitor and measure the impact of the building optimization deployed.   
2. The second step was to implement Spacewell Energy to monitor the BeMS and HVAC systems. The Platform tracks the performance of assets, equipment and systems and quickly identifies anomalies in plant operation, thereby saving energy and maintenance costs.   

Once the above systems were in place, the task of building optimization began.  This started with the CHP plant, ensuring this was operating with the absorption chiller,  BeMS, boilers and electric chillers. When the core systems were operating correctly, this was fine-tuned to maximize efficiency and minimize operating costs.   

During the whole process, data was managed via Spacewell Energy. This allowed the hotel to remotely monitor the performance of the HVAC, BeMS and sub-meters to continually commission and re-commission assets, equipment and systems to ensure they were operating efficiently.  

Since the various assets started operating together as a system and optimization strategies were implemented, significant savings were realized by the hotel. 

Energy Efficiency in Numbers: The Results

The net business impact was an overall reduction on the kWh consumption across the electricity and gas utilities. An impressive 30% came through optimization of existing assets and systems.   

If you’re looking into a solution to help you achieve energy efficiency in hotels, it is necessary that all the elements affecting your energy consumption work in unison. Having different energy efficiency measures put in place throughout your company is not enough.

Monitoring is a key action that must be carried out parallel to the whole energy efficiency plan. If you don’t have a reference consumption level and can’t see your system’s performance in terms of this reference, you won’t be able to know if everything is working as it should be and take the relevant measures in case it’s not.