Can hotel designers make hotels more sustainable?

Was there an energy efficiency expert on the design team for the last hotel you were involved with?  Chances are, the answer is “no”.  Sure, the architect knew plenty about making hotels energy efficient.  And the consulting mechanical and electrical engineer knew plenty about making hotels energy efficient.  Without a doubt the operator’s VP Technical Services also knew plenty about making hotels energy efficient.  Nor was the owner disinterested in the long-term operating costs of this new hotel he was funding.  But still that hotel has come up short of the energy consumption profile it could have achieved.  In many case, w-a-a-a-y short.

The problem is, all these individuals have their own performance criteria, their own agendas, both when they are in their offices doing their work, and when they are sitting at a design meeting or project meeting, fitting their part with everyone else’s.  And although “energy efficiency” appears somewhere of each of their agendas, unfortunately it is not anywhere near the top.

But what about interior designers, lighting designers, and other design specialists?

The answer to this problem has proven to be to pull up another chair at those meetings, a chair occupied by an energy efficiency specialist.  In fact the initiative for taking this step is very likely to come from someone already at the table.  It might come from the owner, who wants to enjoy the fruits of lower energy costs for the next 20 or 30 years.  The prospect of lowering net costs by 50 percent is not a bad incentive.  It might come from the operator, who will get a much smaller share of those fruits, but will also benefit from happier guests and staff if all the energy services deliver to perfection.  It might even come from the architect or M&E consultant, either of whom may have recognised that something has to change if excellence is ever going to be achieved.

Build it in or pay forever

One major benefit from including this energy efficiency specialist arises from the old adage “build it in or pay forever”.  Many energy conserving measures are simply not cost-effective unless adopted at to earliest possible point in the design process.  And there is yet a second set of savings which will be lost as a result of losing the first.  Certain glazing or insulation will reduce the operating costs, but they will also mean that smaller – and therefore less costly – chiller and/or boiler plants will be necessary to meet the load.  Similarly, a ceiling cooling system will eliminate the problem of window-side tables being too hot in that feature restaurant.  But they will also mean the elimination of huge allocations of space for air ducts – however only if the decision is taken early enough to be designed in.

This complexity – each measure interacting with many other ideas and calculations – means that only a fully integrated approach can result in anything resembling the optimal outcome.  So as well as being an expert in computer simulation models, energy savings design criteria, energy efficiency technologies, and energy control and operation methods, your energy efficiency specialist will need to simultaneously deal with cost of capital and alternative financing issues, with managing the risk inherant in doing anything new, with the shifting landscape of energy-related regulations, electricity tariffs and demand-side-management programmes, and with how the timing and interaction relationships between all these factors will affect the final picture. 

But most of all you will need someone with skills of persuasion and diplomacy to overcome the resistance which will beleaguer their efforts along the way.  For despite a long procession of management gurus telling us that change is not only good but imperative, despite countless examples from the manufacturing sector (and even from the service sector), showing how organisations have profited from reengineering themselves and their processes, embracing change is still anathema to many of those around our table.  It will already be difficult to get all these parties to reach a consensus about the multitude of decisions that will need to be made, once someone joins the team whose principal agenda item is “make it energy efficient”.  The energy efficiency specialist will be able to enhance their effectiveness in this regard by being able to support proposals with case histories, vendor sales material, and pointers to other information, technical as well as narrative.  Your specialist will give you even better value if you involve them in the testing and commissioning process (to ensure that everything is fitted and operates the way it was supposed to) and in the real-life operation (insist they help through your hotel’s soft opening, and then come back every year or two to ensure that the hotel is maintaing that energy consumption profile they promised you).

Even with this ground covered, though, if any of the other team members see the inclusion of this specialist as encroaching on their turf, or, worse still, as implying that they were falling down on their job, the image of pushing string uphill will soon come to mind.  It’s not impossible (freeze it first), but it is not easy. 

Then again, no-one ever said that making a hotel energy efficient was easy. Challenging: yes.  Satisfying: yes.  Fun: even that.  But, no, not easy.