Waterfront Hotels’ Chillers: Energy Benchmarking and ESG Reporting

Chammy Lau,Wilco Chan,Irini Lai Fun Tang

doi:10.3390/su13116242

Chammy Lau, Wilco Chan + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116242

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Abstract

Chillers consumes the largest amount power in subtropical hotels. To monitor chillers’ power usage is of critical importance in energy control. This study attempted to establish the benchmark of electricity usage of hotel chillers and elucidate how the benchmarking results can be integrated with the various types reports for monitoring purposes. A survey of 20 waterfront hotels in the city of Greater Bay Area was conducted and 13 complete samples were used in the analysis. Multiple regression with selected 12 parameters—outdoor temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, cooling degree days, room occupancy, number of employees, service types, and unequally sized chillers were employed. The investigation found that the mean electricity usage of a chiller is 118 kWh/m2 on an annual basis for a deluxe waterfront hotel. The analysis excluded air-conditioned floor area, an exploratory variable, as the valid factor in the chiller’s electricity usage. While the overall R2 of the modeling equation for the whole year was limited to 0.76, the explanatory power of equations for humid spring and deep summer reached 80%. Hoteliers may harness this exercise as a reference to monitor and report the performance of key energy production facility per the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) guide.

Highlights

Energy consumption is a major environmental concern in the lodging industry
It was observed that two hotels with more or less the same total floor area and sized chiller design consumed more than average electricity, about 200 kWh/m2
Hotels with unequally sized chillers installed are capable of attaining electricity usage the below mean

Summary

Introduction

Energy consumption is a major environmental concern in the lodging industry. Apart from the depletion of fossil energy resources, indirect emissions from power plants attributable to hotel energy use poses another environment problem that cannot be ignored. Among the various forms of energy used in hotels, electricity is the principal form. A heating ventilation air conditioning (HVAC) system is the core facility accounting for approximately 50% of total electricity consumption in subtropical hotels based on the averages of four prior studies [2,3,4,5]. The chilling subsystem producing and delivering cooled water for airside operations typically accounts for 40% of the entire hotel’s electricity consumption [6]. An effective hotel energy-saving strategy should cover the energy efficiency and energy consumption of chillers. Hotel management should comprehensively monitor the electricity consumption of chillers so as to reduce energy usage more effectively. Benchmarking on hotel chillers’ energy consumption could be one of the other options. The prerequisite for benchmarking is to investigate the relationship between the chiller’s electricity consumption and associated parameters and to subsequently identify ways to report the chiller’s power consumption for control purposes

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