How we saved Village Hotels over £1 million and 4,500 tonnes of carbon

Last updated: 26th June 2020

Since the start of 2017 Village Hotels has worked with Carbon Credentials to formulate and then successfully implement a strategy that would enable Village Hotels to realise substantial energy savings by focusing on both people and data.

This plan included the implementation of our Smart Building Optimisation Programme and a portfolio-wide employee engagement programme across all of the 30 Village sites.

The result? Over £1 million and 4,500 tonnes of carbon saved so far.

Additionally since the programme’s inception, the annualised savings target has risen from £500,000 to £700,000, thanks to continued site optimisation and site engagement

Background

During ESOS (Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme) Phase One, Carbon Credentials performed energy audits at a number of Village Hotel sites. These audits uncovered energy saving opportunities that would help reduce their growing energy costs while also increasing customer comfort.

These opportunities focused on two areas:

  • optimising performance of kit including Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning
  • engaging employees around energy use

The Solution: People

A core part of the strategy for reducing energy usage was to engage employees at all levels of the business. We identified the key stakeholders and the best way in which to engage them. This entailed the creation of a governance structure, which had strong leadership buy-in, and a reporting framework to ensure all stakeholders were kept aware of progress.

To engage the wider population of employees we created an Energy Management e-Learning module which provided:

  • an overview of all energy-saving behaviours
  • tips on gaining insight from monthly performance reports and our ADAPt portal

This module has been completed 2,900 times to date. We also ran launch workshops with a range of stakeholders to ensure that the whole team had the opportunity to feed into the programme from the start.

The Solution: Data

To optimise performance of energy equipment and the Building Management Systems we focused on data.

Our Smart Building Optimisation Programme provides an end-to-end energy optimisation solution from diagnostic and implementation to ongoing performance monitoring to ensure sustained benefits. Smart Building Optimisation Programme helps Maintenance Managers and General Managers to understand how to best manage their hotel’s energy usage and encourages shared learnings between similar hotels to promote best practice. 

Our ADAPt platform enables the Village Hotels team to see visualisations of the energy performance of specific pieces of kit, individual hotels or their entire portfolio. This helps sites to identify actionable insights and drive impact. The team can share actions with BMS contractors as soon as issues are identified so that they can be rectified during service visits. This information continues to drive collaboration between us and Village and delivers savings on an ongoing basis.

We have over 800 million rows of data stored for Village in ADAPt, collecting half hourly data for gas and electricity across all main meters in the 30 hotels, with a process for sites to input meter readings on a monthly basis.

In 2018 alone we sent 2,400 energy reports to help visualise savings and energy consumption to Village staff.

Driving Savings through Engagement

To encourage energy-friendly behaviours, our in-house design team have created a variety of materials, including a range of eye catching posters and stickers to remind staff and guests to use energy responsibly. Impact infographics and quarterly newsletters have also been created to share on staff notice boards.

Further reading

Engage your staff to adopt greener behaviours and help achieve your environmental targets



N.B. The information contained in this entry is provided by the above supplier, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher


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