LOW-ENERGY HOTELS PREMIER INN
Whitbread prides itself as being at the forefront of green hotel design
air source heat pumps. Typically, we will look at a mix of technologies that allow us to hit our BREEAM targets of a minimum of Very Good, achieve a payback of less than 10 years and only cost around 10% more than a typical new build.’ Whitbread has found that there is a
greater degree of certainty with air source heat pump technology. ‘Ground source heat pumps are very site specific so, until you start drilling, you don’t quite know exactly how many boreholes you are going to need to get the desired COP,’ explains Brakes. ‘At Camborne, for example, we had planned for eight boreholes but ended up needing 11. With air source technology, you have much more certainty at around the same payback.’ One of the attractions of heat pump technology is the ability to balance the loads between the hotel and adjacent restaurant. ‘Sharing heat is one of the key benefits of our new-build systems,’ says Brakes. ‘Our philosophy is to make sure the building is as sealed as possible, heat the building once, and don’t lose that energy. With mechanical heat recovery units, you can take the heat out from where it’s being produced and take it to where it’s needed. We’ve seen a large drop in gas consumption as a result.’ Whitbread is taking this commonsense approach further still as it looks to the next generation of buildings. ‘We’ve taken out a lot of the carbon already but we are now looking at the way we build in terms of
8 CIBSE Journal October 2012
orientation, solar shading, eaves over the top windows, and so on,’ explains Brakes. ‘We tend to use a timber frame because there is less carbon used in the build phase than, say, concrete, but one of the issues then is that we don’t have the thermal storage capacity inherent in concrete. So we are looking at how we can increase the thermal store through phase change materials, for example, without resorting to concrete.’
Share and share alike Whitbread prides itself in being at the forefront of green hotel design and is keen to share knowledge with its peers. ‘We share best practice with the likes of Hilton and Marriott via the World Travel and Tourism Council and the International Tourism Partnership. We are working on a carbon measurement benchmark tool where we will be able to judge how we are performing,’ says Brakes. So far Whitbread seems to be performing
very nicely. Relative to sales, carbon emission efficiency has already improved by 20% from its 2009 base line. ‘We know that the hotels we are building are using less carbon but zero carbon regulations are due to come in during 2019,’ says Brakes. ‘The existing estate will also have to be reduced further but we are confident that we will hit our 25% target for 2017, and as we get closer to that we will set a target for 2020.’
We are looking at how we can increase the thermal store through phase change materials, for example, without resorting to concrete
WHITBREAD IN NUMBERS ● 80,000 LED lamps fitted across the estate
● 100 voltage optimisation units installed, with energy saved equal to powering Blackpool illuminations for 379 days
● 100 restaurants had insulation and lagging improvements to boiler/plant rooms
● 35,000 water-saving shower heads and regulators fitted, saving enough water to fill more than 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools
● All restaurant and Premier Inn sites had full high specification loft insulation fitted, enough to cover Wembley football pitch 54 times
● Solar film installed at 80 Premier Inn sites to address ‘hot room’ issues and to save energy
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