NIANTIC, CONN.—INNCOM International Inc., a leader in advanced guestroom automation systems for hotels and resorts, addressed several hundred delegates at the China Cleantech Industry Investment Summit in Beijing to promote its “cleantech” energy strategy in China designed to reduce coal consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by millions of metric tons. With offices in Hong Kong and India, the company’s Asian customer base is growing. INNCOM’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the region and become part of the overall green solution for China.
“INNCOM is still a relatively small corporation, and yet our presently installed systems are saving the energy equivalent of one supertanker full of oil each year, equating to more than 2 million barrels of oil or 400,000 metric tons of coal,” said Duane Buckingham, INNCOM chairman, to the lodging industry investors and government functionaries involved in China’s emphasis on “cleantech” industries and its push to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. “Beyond the profit motive, there is great satisfaction in knowing that we are contributing to the reduction of greenhouse gases.
“In just one 200-room hotel or other building in China, carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by more than 400 metric tons per year,” he said. “You can imagine the huge impact there would be from systems installed in 5,000 or 10,000 such buildings. And that is readily achievable.”
Company Already in China
INNCOM presently manufactures many of its products in China. In addition to ensuring hardware quality, Buckingham said advanced software and manufacturing know-how is equally important to build an effective energy-management system (EMS). An in-depth understanding of who the customer is and how best to implement an EMS with the proper software is key to achieving energy savings while not causing discomfort to end users, he said.
“INNCOM’s primary mission is to design, manufacture and sell systems and expertise that permit our customers to reduce energy consumption and costs without having a negative impact on comfort,” Buckingham said. “If you look at the macro numbers in terms of the amount of coal which China uses each year just for energy generation—somewhere around 2 billion metric tons—and the country could save only 5 percent of that through energy-management systems, it would eliminate 100 million metric tons of coal consumption and reduce carbon dioxide pollution by multiple millions of metric tons each year.
“This would go a long way toward China reducing the need to import increasingly expensive energy fuels and positively contribute to the government’s goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
“There has been a great deal of recent international focus on ‘alternative energy sources,’ such as solar power, wind power, geothermal power and so forth, and development of those is surely important,” Buckingham said. “However, what is commonly overlooked is the tremendous reduction in energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions which can be achieved now, in the very near-term, just by implementing well-designed energy-management systems. And that is the main cleantech message that I would like to convey today.”
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