Most hotel chains delayed significant energy conservation moves during the economic downturn, but now one, Marriott International, has signed a deal to reduce its hotels energy use, particularly during times of peak demand.
Marriott will save on electric bills and also earn incentive payments from utilities as a reward for its efforts during peak periods, like heat waves, when utilities struggle to meet demand and often have to pay high prices to obtain electricity.
But the success or failure of the program, the first involving a hotel chain, will be in how well it can make the cuts without affecting or, more important, annoying its customers.
Douglas Rath, an energy director for Marriott, is helping the company switch to automated technology to reduce power use.
Its a very thin line you have to be careful not to alienate your customers when introducing cost-saving programs, said David Loeb, a senior analyst and managing director at Robert W. Baird & Co.
Marriott signed the agreement with Constellation Energy last month and plans to adopt the energy-saving program at 264 of its hotels in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states and in Texas and California.
The cuts in electricity use will vary by hotel, depending on the size, climate, geographical location and other factors. In general, hotels may use less air-conditioning in the hallways, dim the lighting in certain common areas, shut water fountains, rearrange cooling cycles and even close certain elevator banks. Also, certain hotels will reduce energy use in individual rooms that have not been booked, with infrared sensors and motion detectors flagging the central system when rooms are vacant.
We might move the room temperature to 78 degrees in an unrented room rather than 72 in a rented room, said Douglas Rath, energy director for Marriott International in the Americas.
In the past, Marriott has manually reduced power at certain times, but now specific cuts will be made automatically. The VirtuWatt energy management system from Constellation will work with the hotels property management system to track power use and automatically activate the cuts when utilities are strained.
In some cases, the program will reduce energy use in advance of an expected heat wave. Theyd run the chillers overnight and make sure the common areas are cooled down to, say, 67 degrees when normally theyd keep it at 72, said Gary Fromer, senior vice president for demand response at Constellation Energy. Then they would allow the temperature to slowly rise to 72 or 73 degrees during the window of time where you want to control the usage.
Constellation will cover about half the cost of installing the automated technology, but Rath said most hotels would break even on the investment within two years and generate at least 25 percent returns and as much as 100 percent returns by the end of the five-year agreement through the cost savings and the incentive payments.
In effect, the hotels act like a generator in the market, and a reduction in consumption is roughly the same as the addition of a new generator to the system, Fromer said. And so we pay them roughly what we would have paid a generator to produce the same amount of energy.
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