Abstract
Tourism, and thereby hotels, play a crucial role in the European economy. The hotel sector features high energy consumption, which greatly contributes to the global warming effect. Thus, there is a need to investigate environmentally friendly technologies that have the potential to reduce energy usage within this sector. Information regarding the current status of the energy consumption in hotels is essential. Therefore, a study of 140 hotels in Norway and Sweden is presented in this paper to identify successful and sustainable measures to reduce energy consumption and related emissions.
The energy use, available energy sources and thermal systems in the hotels are studied over a five-year period to identify consumption trends. The results reveal that 70% of the hotels have a mean annual energy consumption between 150 and 250 kWh/m2. A shift towards sustainable energy sources is observed in the hotels from 2015 to 2019, where application and overall consumption of district heating and cooling have increased, while electrical energy consumption has been reduced. District heating is the most prominent source of heating and is applied as the primary heat source in 70% of the hotels. The specific energy consumption for the group hotels that apply district heating is 218.9 kWh/m2/year, which is nearly 25% higher than the specific energy consumption of the 9% of hotels that apply heat pump solutions as a primary heat source. Thus, there is a potential to reduce the specific energy consumption in hotels. Two integrated transcritical carbon dioxide (CO2) heat pumps were investigated as a sustainable measure to reduce energy consumption. The results reveal that a reduction of thermal energy consumption of approximately 60% can be achieved.
1. Introduction
According to the EU strategic plan for heating and cooling in buildings, new and sustainable solutions for generating thermal energy must be applied to achieve the 2-degree goal of the Paris Agreement (EC, 2016). Presently, buildings account for more than 40% of the total end-use energy consumption in Europe (Rousselot, 2018). Approximately 1/3 of this energy consumption and related emissions is connected to the commercial sector (Eurostat, 2017). By implementing measures to increase efficiency and manage demands, it is estimated that energy saving of 30% can be achieved within the commercial sector (Economidou et al., 2011; EC, 2006).
4. Conclusions
The energy consumption in cold-climate hotels has been studied for the period 2015e2019 by using field measurements. The following conclusions can be made based on the investigation of 140 hotels in Norway and Sweden.
70% of the hotels have a mean annual energy consumption between 150 and 250 kWh/m2 /year, with the mean value for all hotels being 213 kWh/m2 /year. Thus, there is a potential to further reduce the energy consumption in the hotels.
A shift towards sustainable energy sources is observed in the sample hotels from 2015 to 2019. Electricity is the most applied energy source in hotels and accounted for more than 70% of the total energy use in 2015. However, the overall electricity consumption was reduced by 8% from 2015 to 2019 in favor of district heating, which increased by 7% over the same period. The access to district heating and cooling increased by 18.0 and 10.9% from 2015 to 2019. The number of hotels with only electricity access has been halved over the five-year period.
