LEED hotel Identifies $60K/Year in Energy Savings With 1-Year Payback

Savings Identified in a LEED Silver Certified Embassy Suites Within Hours Using buildee®

Introduction

The Embassy Suites is a luxury hotel chain with over 230 locations, representing almost 100 million square feet. These hotel locations have varying degrees of efficiency, which presents an opportunity to undertake operational and retrofit projects in order to save energy and money as well as add value to the portfolio of hotels.

Correlate, an energy management services firm for portfolio building owners, was contracted to manage an onsite energy program for an investment firm which owns hotel properties, including Embassy Suites. The energy program included coordination of an on-site energy assessment of the Embassy Suites Denver Downtown, a 550,000 square foot, LEED-Silver certified hotel, built in 2009, and renovated in 2017.

buildee® was utilized during this assessment to quickly identify energy saving opportunities in the hotel and provide metrics on energy upgrade potential. Work that would normally take weeks was accomplished in under 3 hours at a low cost, saving the hotel owners tens of thousands of dollars while still providing credible insights.

Challenge

The Correlate and Embassy Suites teams were tasked with identifying high ROI and short payback retrofit projects in this LEED Silver property. Assessing a large building with many different spaces, like a hotel, in a short amount of time is usually not possible because an energy assessment that produces actionable metrics is often a time and cost intensive process. This specific hotel had been renovated in 2017, so there was no clear economic value to the owner to spend thousands of dollars on an assessment.