30% KWH REDUCTION FOR east midlands hotel

NEW ENERGY STRATEGY ACHIEVES SIGNIFICANT GAS & ELECTRICITY CONSUMPTION WITHIN 12 MONTHS

17%

Reduction in ELECTRICITY usage

41%

REDUCTION IN GAS CONSUMPTION

ABOUT

RADISSON BLU

The Radisson Hotel at East Midlands Airport is a 218 bedroom hotel featuring extensive conference facilities, swimming pool and leisure facilities. Designed as a BREEAM Excellent building, the hotel was opened in 2011 and considered the greenest hotel in the UK.

The hotel also boasts a 285kW bio-oil CHP (Combined Heat and Power) system that would generate enough electrical power to support the hotel, while converting waste heat as a primary source of heating and cooling for the hotel. This ‘green’ CHP plant operates on waste bio-oil (Ethyl Ester) that qualifies for the maximum number of ROC’s (Renewable Obligation Certificates) under the governments renewables scheme. 

INDUSTRY

SERVICES DELIVERED

Challenge

MAXIMISING EFFICIENCY OF EXISTING BUILDING ENERGY MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

While this superb facility was designed, developed and handed over to the hotel operator, the Azure Group as a BREEAM Excellent Building, the operating costs, and in particular the utility costs did not reflect the operation of the greenest hotel in the UK. The operators of the hotel now had the challenge of how to make this superb facility operate as efficiently as possible and not really sure where the baseline should be set. As with any new build, teething issues occur within the first few months or even years that may not be obvious at the time handover takes place. 

Two years after the hotel opened, Optimised were commissioned by the hotel to ‘optimise’ the operation of HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning), the BEMS (Building Energy Management System), Absorption Chiller and CHP (Combined Heat and Power) along with providing a managed service to look at the overall energy management of the hotel. It was soon evident that some fundamental challenges lay ahead. While the individual systems mentioned above were commissioned, they were not commissioned to operate together or commissioned for season change, and as a result the hotel was operating very inefficiently from an energy efficiency perspective – costing the operator dearly. 

solution

OPTIMISING BEMS CONTROL STRATEGIES TO STORE PERFORMANCE SPECIFICATION

The first objective was to monitor the energy being consumed through the extensive sub metering that was installed into the hotel. These meters were already linked into the Trend BEMS which minimised the integration requirements, this half hourly data was logged and ‘pushed’ to our cloud-based aM&T (automatic Monitoring and Targeting) software, which created the transparency and baseline data to effectively monitor and measure the impact of the building optimisation deployed.

This was followed by implementing BEMS Analytics software, to monitor the HVAC systems through intelligent algorithms. This cloud-based platform tracks the performance of assets, equipment and systems and quickly identifies anomalies in plant operation saving energy and maintenance costs.

Once the above systems were in place the task of building optimisation began. This started with the CHP plant, ensuring this was operating with the Absorption Chiller, BEMS, Boilers and electric Chillers. Once the core systems were operating correctly this was finely tuned to maximise the efficiency and minimise the operating costs.

After these core areas were addressed, the Optimised Remote Optimisation team monitored the performance of the HVAC, BEMS and sub-meters, to continually commission and re-commission assets, equipment and systems to ensure they were operating efficiently.