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Decentralised Energy – the answer for the Hotel industry’s rising energy and carbon challenge?
Why Decentralised Energy? Why now?
Given their obvious focus on customer care and comfort, hotels have a large year round requirement for electricity and hot water. Rooms must be kept at a pleasant temperature at all times of the day and swimming pools, saunas and other services must be available at all times , regardless of their usage by customers. Hotels are therefore an ideal candidate to benefit from the energy reduction advantages of decentralised energy, whether the most appropriate technology is Combined Heat and Power or on-site renewable energy technologies.
Decentralised energy may be a relatively new concept to some of us, but it was in fact been installed in some UK hotels (via CHP technology) up to 20 years ago. So why are we hearing more about it now? And why is the UK government aiming to increase its implementation?
Technological advances have produced CHP units that are smaller in size, more efficient and more reliable, therefore applicable to the medium sized energy users, such as for example a 100 room 4 star hotel. Smaller units increase the economic and environmental feasibility of implementing Combined Heat and Power (CHP), increasing the number of applicable users.
Common aim
Decentralised energy has become a key focus for all UK energy policy makers and those with a keen interested to reduce the environmental consequences of our energy consumption. However we have a long way to go to catch our advanced European peers. Decentralised energy provides over 50% of electricity supplies in Denmark and over 40% in the Netherlands. In the UK only 7% of electricity comes from CHP, a level many figureheads want to increase.
Boris Johnson, in one of his first major speeches after being elected, outlined one of his methods of reducing London’s carbon emissions by 60% by 2025 as “a big increase in investment in decentralised energy, e.g: Combined Heat and Power plants, to deliver 25% of London’s energy locally by 2025, thereby improving London's energy security.”
The benefits of decentralised energy in hotels
- Overall annual energy costs reduced
- Greater efficiency in fuel use helps cut greenhouse gases
- Electricity purchased from grid reduced
- “Good Quality” CHP is exempt from the Climate Charge Levy (CCL)
- CHP units can act as standby generation equipment
- Increased security of supply, less vulnerable to grids power outages and associated emergency costs
For more information on how Self Energy could save your hotel money and carbon commissions, please contact info@selfenergy.co.uk or phone +44 (0)20 8144 4348.
19/11/09