Situation

Pestana is the largest Portuguese hotel group, with over 100 locations in Europe, Africa and the Americas. With energy prices on the rise, they wanted to implement a comprehensive energy efficiency management system in their hotels throughout Portugal. The group’s goals were to increase energy efficiency, reduce overall costs, and replace inefficient equipment.

Pestana had already tested several solutions on the market, but none of them met all of their key requirements. What’s more, they were looking for a partner that would provide them with energy efficiency services.

In sum, they needed a modular, interoperable and centralized energy management system that would allow them to:

• Monitor the electricity, water, gas consumption of specific equipment and areas.
• Integrate key information on factors such as occupation, meals served, weather, etc.
• Receive alarms whenever abnormal consumption is detected.
• Obtain information on other variables such as temperature & humidity, energy production, heat, among others.

Solution

Cleanwatts partnered with Pestana and implemented Cleanwatts™ OS. This operating system allows them to monitor electricity, gas and water consumption at 23 of the group’s hotels. This permanent energy management service gives the group a global, centralized and aggregated view of the entire energy structure.

Cleanwatts™ OS receives information directly from devices installed at over 400 monitoring points (Total, HVAC, Heating, among others), aggregating the collected data and making it easily visible to end-users. This allows users to access real-time and historical consumption data from all installed monitoring points and make all sorts of analysis.

The Cleanwatts™ OS can also identify energy consumption anomalies which are reported to the Pestana maintenance team to correct them. Examples of these irregularities include refrigerators working outside of their programmed schedule, or laundries and kitchens with abnormal consumption levels during non-working hours. Cleanwatts also provides Pestana with customizable reports and energy management services.

Cleanwatts™ OS was also used to integrate key data such as room occupation, and what meals were served in one centralized online platform. Cleanwatts™ OS is intuitive and easy to use, and Cleanwatts also provided Pestana employees with training to ensure they could make the best use of the energy monitoring and management system.

Cleanwatts also worked to improve the efficiency of the installed equipment with better maintenance planning to increase the equipment lifetime. What’s more, inefficient equipment was replaced with new chillers, recirculating pumps with VFD, and new LED lighting system, while the heat distribution network was also completely overhauled.

Results

Pestana’s partnership with Cleanwatts proved to be a success. They have reduced their annual energy costs by over €70.000, which represents around 5% yearly savings. In addition, their annual maintenance costs were reduced by 10%. These factors allowed Pestana to have a return on their investment in little over 3 years, with many savings to follow in the years ahead. Their carbon footprint also improved, with an annual reduction of CO2 emissions of around 19%.