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Archive for December, 2010

A few weeks ago I fond out from the Nashville solar company that I am repping for that someone I had sent out the mailers to called and wanted to have an appointment to talk about solar on his business. (note to self: I really feel like they weren’t going to tell me about it). Anyway. We called the owner and set an appointment. After a walk through of his hotel facility and gathering up 10 months of electric bills we set out to put together a plan to get solar power on this building.

The business is paying out over $5,000.00 dollars per month in electric bills. Most of the problem as we have learned is contributed to 3 areas. They have an indoor swimming pool that must be maintained at certain regulatory settings and the room the pool is in must constantly be dehumidified. With an exchange of fresh air every so many minutes. The other area is the individual room HVAC units. They are heat pumps with resistance strips as backup heat. When you combine all this together you are looking at a good 80KW per month base power demand.

The local electric company charges a higher rate per KWH for anything above 50KW per month. A whopping 13.55 per kilowatt hour. So our mission is to get things under the 50 kw bar. How can we do this?

Let’s start with the pool. An open body of heated water. A large bath tub if you will. It gets heated by what amounts to a industrial size on-demand electric water heater. This uses about 26KW at any given time when engaged.  Cover the pool as much and as often as possible. This would be a hassle for the staff and owner to fool with day-in and day-out. But would save a significant amount of money over a years time. However, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year someone would have to cover the pool at 10:00 PM and uncover it at 9:00 AM. It is doable is put into a daily maintenance plan. How many KW would this save. There is no real street level way of calculating it. Would just have to do it an see.

Next is a more practical approach and that is put a timer on the water heater. Set it so as to keep the pool at the minimum state regulated requirement. So for some time of the day it would be shut off completely. It would be easy to figure percentage wise as to the possible KW that would be saved in this option. The heater is off 30% then they would reduce energy consumption by about 20%. Because there would be an initial draw on current required to bring up the temperature of the water up the savings would not be a 1-to-1 ratio.

Third and best option is apply solar thermal to the equation. I propose that by adding a good sized solar thermal water heating package to the mix the owner would cut the cost of heating his pool by 100% after ROI time of 3 years.

Coupled with a 60KW PV system the whole package would run in the neighborhood of $410,000.00. By using the escalated depreciation schedule plan they would have the system paid out in 5 years.

What do you think? Is this something you are familiar with? Do you have experience with hotel facility energy consumption? I wold like to hear what your think. Leave a pertinent comment.

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