How much energy does a hotel use?

The amount of energy a hotel uses will depend on how many bedrooms it has, as well as how many additional facilities there are on site. Business energy usage, much like in our homes, will also go up or down depending on the time of year, but most of a hotel’s energy goes into heating the building and providing hot water to guests.

According to data from the Department of Environment, nearly 70 per cent of a hotel’s energy consumption goes towards heating and hot water. This figure was determined after conducting a survey of 50 UK hotels. Lighting only accounts for eight per cent, and catering 12 per cent. What we can gather from this is that a hotel will use significantly more gas than electricity. So, now that we know how energy usage can be broken down, exactly how much energy does a hotel consume?

The easiest way to work out energy consumption is per bedroom. This figure can then be multiplied by however many guest rooms a hotel has, so whether it’s a small boutique hotel with less than 25 rooms or a large hotel with over 100, you can estimate the total energy use.

Let’s start by calculating the approximate energy use per bedroom in a small hotel. Generally, small hotels are defined as those that have 25 rooms or less and each room is approximately 60 m². For every square meter of one bedroom, around 300 kWh of gas is used per year and around 100 kWh of electricity. These figures are for just one metre squared, and so we will need to multiply each of these fuels by 60 m².

300 kWh of gas * 60 m² = 18,000 kWh per bedroom per year

100 kWh of electricity * 60 m² = 6,000 kWh per bedroom per year

You can use these answers to narrow down the energy usage even further to per month and even per day.

To get the monthly hotel energy usage, you can divide these figures by 12 and then multiply them by the number of rooms you have in your hotel.

This means that the average small hotel uses approximately 37,500 kWh of gas per month and 12,500 kWh of electricity per month. could mean that a large hotel with 100 bedrooms could use around 266,000 kWh of gas and 80,000 kWh of electricity per month

Obviously, these calculations only take into account the total energy used by bedrooms. If you have additional restaurants within the hotel, these will use significantly more energy than we’ve stated above.

Larger hotels have more rooms and generally, each bedroom is slightly larger too, though this isn’t always the case. For our calculations, we’ll say that the average floor area is 80 m². Compared to a smaller hotel, the average gas and electricity usage per m2 per year goes up to around 400 kWh for gas and 120 kWh for electricity. Using the same calculations as above, this

Nowadays, most hotels have lifts to make it easier to get to the top floors, particularly when you have heavy luggage to carry. Lifts also make a building more accessible. But how much electricity does a lift use?

A lift actually only uses a small amount of electricity, so you don’t have to worry about it sending your electricity bill sky high. It’s thought that a lift uses approximately 2.5 Wh of electricity to move just one floor. Therefore, a lift that has to move 10 floors, for example, could use 25 Wh of electricity, but this is still a very small amount.