Whitbread has achieved energy savings of more than 12% across around a range of hotels following an energy efficiency and intelligent systems upgrade with E.ON.
E.ON’s business energy efficiency experts worked with Whitbread to identify an initial 90 sites for improvement, each with a different array of operational requirements and installed equipment.
These sites were remotely connected to E.ON’s 24/7 Energy Management Centre to monitor consumption and operations to safeguard the overall investment for the long term.
So far, energy consumption reductions have ranged between 5% and 35%, with some sites saving much more than expected. Overall results to date are ahead of expectations – an average reduction of 12% – and on course to exceed the expected return on investment.
Cian Hatton, head of energy and environment, at Whitbread, said: “After reaching our previous carbon target three years early, we set out a new ambitious target to reduce emissions across our hotel estate, acknowledging the need to innovate and develop tailored solutions based on hard data and genuine energy consumption insight.
“As one of the first in the hospitality industry to use remote energy management across our sites, we trialled several different energy suppliers to find a system that provided detailed feedback across multiple buildings. E.ON’s integrated approach and range of solutions spanned our entire energy strategy, from big data to investment including ongoing control and support– providing an effective hardware and software partnership.“
Tom Montali, customer accounts director at E.ON, added: “Within the hospitality industry it is imperative that major works do not impact on the experience or comfort for guests. Whitbread needed to find a solution that delivered the energy consumption savings required whilst taking account of the different building styles and sizes as well as operational demands. With differing demands and challenges our solution was flexible enough to deliver the savings required whilst maintaining customisation for guests’ expectations.
“The data intelligence gleaned through our systems enabled us to focus on sites with the largest potential for improvements and were designed to maximise the potential savings compared to a more traditional rollout programme.”
Whitbread was looking to develop an energy reduction strategy for consistency across brands and units through big data driven insight, energy efficiency capital investment and better management of energy consumption.
Combining multiple data sources including half hourly electricity and gas meters, weather impacts and existing data from building energy management systems as well as site-specific factors such as solar generation, combined heat and power plants and business information such as hotel occupancy and restaurant covers into E.ON’s data management system provided Whitbread with a new level of understanding of its estate.
E.ON’s improvements centred on the installation of Building Energy Management Systems (BeMS) to monitor and control the primary energy consuming assets at individual sites. In addition, E.ON captured any energy efficiency opportunities available on a site by site basis. These included LED lighting retrofits, HVAC and catering extract systems.