Introduction to – The Challenges of Energy Monitoring in Hospitality:
The hospitality industry is increasingly focusing on better energy management as it looks to improve guest comfort levels while optimising energy consumption. The effort is to reduce carbon footprint, bring in more energy efficiency by use of data-driven approaches and keep operational costs under check.
One of the main challenges faced is the lack of granular information of energy consumption that is ready to hand throughout hospitality facilities such as hotels, spas, bars and restaurants. Most hotels and spas have no sub-meters, only one main gas meter, and one electricity meter, which are used, mainly for billing reasons. Hence no clear information on where the intense energy areas are or where energy waste is occurring.
Understanding energy and operations components (such as energy and operations spend and its break-up, its correlation with business needs, guest comfort, weather, availability, etc.) in the sector is the first step towards this.
Introducing Energy Efficiency Measures in Hospitality:
An effectively deployed, data-centric framework will boost operational efficiencies with minimum capital investments. Being a continuous process, it also helps sustain the operational improvements and energy savings for a longer period. The centralized view enables organisations to compare their performances through benchmarking and by prioritising action plans.
Staff play an important monitoring link and are likely to know about appliances left running unnecessarily, temperature variations throughout the hotel or inefficiencies in lighting, etc. However, staff can also contribute directly, through their behavior to excess and needless consumption. For instance, having insight on appliances that be optimised for improved and efficient performance, knowing when training exercises should be engaged in to help educate on when and why energy should be consumed for benefit of the customer’s experience or even something as simple as devices left powered on overnight. The overall aim needs to be energy efficiency becoming an integral part of your hotel’s culture.
One of the breakthrough technologies now available to enable this understanding is advanced energy monitoring and analytics. The technology can monitor energy-consuming assets, such as refrigerators, kitchen equipment, air conditioning systems, air handling units, lighting circuits, etc. It pinpoints where waste is occurring and where investment in energy-efficient technologies can pay off. Our energy insights solution is helping organisations to discover hidden energy-saving opportunities, while often uncovering opportunities to improve the performance of their energy assets. This technology is quick, simple, and affordable to install and delivers valuable outputs from the data that allow for hotel and hospitality facilities to act.
Conclusion:
With the astronomical rise in energy costs already apparent and showing no sign of halting any time soon, combined with organisational ambitions to become more aware of where they’re using energy, and any sustainability strategy, the need for valuable and accurate data is only on an upwards trajectory.
The more data the better and most importantly the right quality of data enables smarter decision-making to be made.
If you want to discuss how IoT can open up new opportunities or resolve those own going challenges, Contact James – IoT Solution Specialist.
