Waterfront Hotels’ Chillers: Energy Benchmarking and ESG Reporting

Abstract

Chillers consumes the largest amount power in subtropical hotels. To monitor chillers’ power usage is of critical importance in energy control. This study attempted to establish the benchmark of electricity usage of hotel chillers and elucidate how the benchmarking results can be integrated with the various types reports for monitoring purposes. A survey of 20 waterfront hotels in the city of Greater Bay Area was conducted and 13 complete samples were used in the analysis. Multiple regression with selected 12 parameters—outdoor temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, cooling degree days, room occupancy, number of employees, service types, and unequally sized chillers were employed. The investigation found that the mean electricity usage of a chiller is 118 kWh/m2 on an annual basis for a deluxe waterfront hotel. The analysis excluded air-conditioned floor area, an exploratory variable, as the valid factor in the chiller’s electricity usage. While the overall R2 of the modeling equation for the whole year was limited to 0.76, the explanatory power of equations for humid spring and deep summer reached 80%. Hoteliers may harness this exercise as a reference to monitor and report the performance of key energy production facility per the Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) guide.