As a hotelier, you are probably benchmarking most aspects of your business. For example, you already track how your average daily rate, your occupancy, and your RevPAR stack up against those of your competition. Benchmarking your hotel’s energy performance provides the same type of information, helping you to understand facility operations and compare your performance to your competitors while reducing operating costs. Now benchmarking energy performance is even easier, with a number of energy information service providers offering tools to automate the process, giving hoteliers easy access to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) energy performance rating system.
As a core component of the EPA’s ENERGY STAR Commercial Buildings Program, a building can obtain an energy performance rating of 1 to 100, based on the building’s operating characteristics, location, and monthly energy use. The result is a comparative performance indicator that provides essential information to organizations striving to reduce their energy costs. Once a single hotel or a portfolio of hotels have received ratings, operations and maintenance staff can easily compare the energy performance of these facilities against one another and against the national average rating of 50. This information is critical for identifying poor performers, proposing and prioritizing upgrades, earning recognition for top performers, and identifying best practices that can be communicated and replicated.
Members of the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA) now have access to an online, easy-to-use benchmarking tool that can help them obtain the ENERGY STAR rating for their properties. AH&LA, in partnership with Burton Energy Group, is providing members with access to GreenQuest—a free, online energy information website that incorporates EPA’s national energy performance rating system. Users enter building information and energy and water bills for a single building, and the tool returns an ENERGY STAR rating and other energy and environmental information.
Automated Benchmarking
GreenQuest, built by EnergyCAP, Inc., has reporting features that measure the effects of new energy conservation measures, track carbon, anticipate future energy use and cost (accounting for weather data), and display how these metrics compare with other similar properties in the GreenQuest database. In order to provide users with EPA’s 1-to-100 energy performance rating, the GreenQuest tool incorporates a process called “automated benchmarking,” which was developed by EPA to allow Web-enabled software to exchange data over the Internet with EPA’s online tool, Portfolio Manager.
GreenQuest makes it easier for AH&LA members to use the ENERGY STAR rating tool in order to understand the impact of energy and water use on their hotels, and their carbon footprint. It helps them implement a key aspect of AH&LA’s green guidelines—managing hotel environmental performance by monitoring electric, gas, water, and waste usage information on a monthly and annual basis. Since its launch in the summer of 2009, more than 30 AH&LA members have used GreenQuest to benchmark their buildings and receive the ENERGY STAR rating.
“We’re expecting this number to grow significantly in the coming months as AH&LA further promotes the use of GreenQuest to its 11,000 members,” says Pat Maher, a consultant to AH&LA. (AH&LA members can see more information about GreenQuest and access the tool from Burton Energy Group’s website. Click here to access the site.)
Works for Small to Large Portfolios
GreenQuest is ideally suited for independent owner/operators or franchisees who are seeking to track the performance of individual properties or small groups of properties. However, companies with larger portfolios may also wish to explore the option of leveraging EPA’s automated benchmarking functionality by working directly with energy information service providers.
In recent years, a variety of organizations—including software companies specializing in property management and sustainability, utility procurement and bill processing, and energy services companies—have started offering automated benchmarking services. These services exchange client building data with EPA’s benchmarking tool, Portfolio Manager, over the Internet. Automated benchmarking providers can help their clients obtain EPA’s 1-to-100 energy performance rating more efficiently than through manual data entry into Portfolio Manager. Organizations are integrating EPA’s automated benchmarking capabilities into their existing energy software and services because of the growing demand from clients partnering with ENERGY STAR, as well as the differentiating value of providing the easy-to-understand EPA energy performance metric.
Hotel companies are quickly realizing the added value of working with automated benchmarking service providers. Not only does automated benchmarking facilitate a quicker start to the benchmarking process, but it can also provide owners and operators with up-to-date energy performance information that can help to prioritize energy management projects and track improvements across large portfolios. By taking a portfolio-wide approach to benchmarking, organizations can more readily identify properties that are candidates for improvements, and which are the top performers that can help to highlight and communicate energy management best practices.
Marriott Benefits from Advantage IQ Relationship
Marriott International, which has a longstanding relationship with its service provider, Advantage IQ, has experienced the benefit of using automated benchmarking. All of Marriott’s domestic managed properties have been benchmarked in Portfolio Manager, and energy information is being updated monthly through Advantage IQ’s tracking software. Equipped with up-to-date knowledge about how these buildings are performing, Marriott has been able to measure and demonstrate the effectiveness of the company’s energy management projects. In 2008 alone, Marriott achieved savings of $1.3 million as a result of ongoing energy management techniques. By benchmarking through Advantage IQ, Marriott has also been able to earn the ENERGY STAR for a total of 275 properties—the most of any hospitality company.
It is often stated that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” By leveraging the regular energy performance reporting that is made available via automated benchmarking, hoteliers across the country are more effectively managing their energy consumption, realizing savings, and reducing their carbon footprints. With the advent of GreenQuest—and its promotion by AH&LA—the option to benefit from automated benchmarking is now available to a wide range of hoteliers, from individual properties to entire portfolios. To see more information about automated benchmarking, as well as a listing of “Participating Automated Benchmarking Service Providers,” visit www.energystar.gov/abs.
Bill Von Neida is a program manager with the U.S. EPA’s ENERGY STAR Commercial Buildings Program.
