Development of an Enterprise-wide Energy Information and Utility Monitoring System in a Major Hotel Chain: The Hyatt Hotels Corporation Experience

Abstract

Hyatt Hotels Corporation is currently implementing an enterprise-wide Energy Information and Utility Monitoring System (UMS). New Horizon Technologies and eComponents Technology have teamed to provide an integrated solution that will ultimately include all Hyatt Hotels in North America. In addition, these 120 Hyatt Hotels participate in a monthly web-based energy benchmarking and hotel engineering reporting system. For hotels with Utility Monitoring Systems (UMS) installed, energy and water consumption data is automatically summarized for the web reports. Hotels without the UMS enter monthly utility data manually on the website. The base UMS at the hotels consists of electric, gas and domestic water consumption and local temperature and relative humidity measurements. The Hyatt UMS is one of the first enterprise-wide systems to include domestic water metering. Many hotels elect to install additional sub-metering for major loads or end uses such as chillers, kitchens and laundries. The local hotel UMS consists of a data acquisition system capable of displaying real-time data that also logs 15-minute interval data. The system transfers interval data daily, to a data center and also transfers interval data hourly, via a Local Area Network, to an on-site workstation with a local database. The local workstation permits users to have real-time alarming capability, access to easy-touse data visualization and analysis tools, and the ability to generate both customized and standard daily and monthly reports. Report writing and utility costing software are used to generate daily and month-to-date cost reports. Bill estimation software uses actual utility rate tariff models to create estimates of utility costs for any custom defined period. Data resident in the Hyatt data center is accessible to the individual hotels using a web-based system. Senior engineers with authorization can access data for all Hyatt Hotels in their regions. The corporate energy director and senior management have access to all data in the Hyatt data center. Browser-based hotel benchmarking data is also available through a similar system with an authorization hierarchy. This paper will describe the design and implementation of the Hyatt UMS in detail, review how the system is currently being used by Hyatt personnel, discuss potential future applications and provide an initial look at UMS system-wide data, including a preliminary return on investment (ROI) analysis.