Whitbread PLC is the UK’s largest hotel and restaurant group operating market-leading businesses in budget hotels, restaurants and coffee shops.  Its brands are Premier Inn, Costa, Beefeater, Brewers Fayre, Table Table and Taybarns.
 
It employs over 40,000 people globally and serves more than 22 million customers every month in over 2,000 outlets across the UK.
 
Whitbread has outlined five-year growth milestones (to 2018) to increase the number of Premier Inn UK rooms to at least 75,000 and to double the size of Costa with global system sales of £2bn. Whitbread is extending the use of CHP systems across its property portfolio.
 
Its commitment to increasing the industry’s collective knowledge about how the technology works in a wide variety of buildings and in tandem with other carbon reducing measures is proving invaluable and deserving of recognition.
 
Senior staff – led by property supply chain manager Mitesh Panikker – have been working with Baxi Commercial Division to for several years to fine tune the role CHP plays the group’s overall carbon reduction strategy.
 
Whitbread, is committed to making all of its buildings 30% more energy efficient and has a broadly based research programme in place to help achieve that goal.
 
Currently with 675 Premier Inn hotels and 56,000 bedrooms, Whitbread has greater potential than most to cut emissions and reduce running costs by using carbon saving technologies. Some of the new hotels are converted office blocks rather than new builds. This further enhances the company’s sustainability credentials because they are reducing the environmental impact of their projects, but it also means they face more challenging building services design issues in adapting the buildings to new usage patterns.
 
Whitbread is researching building fabric solutions such as solar shading on all south facing facades to reduce the potential for overheating and to improve insulation.  It opened a flagship ‘green’ hotel in Burgess Hill to trial a wide range of low carbon techniques such as grey water recycling, natural insulation, heat recovery ventilation, LED lighting and ground source heat pumps.
 
“We continue to review all viable sustainable options” said Mitesh. “It is important that we work with a robust supply chain to help drive innovation access advance technical expertise. We need our solutions to be viable throughout the operational life of a hotel and so our partnership with Baxi is crucial to us.”
 
Fuel cell
As well as continuing adoption of CHP, Whitbread asked Baxi to carry out a full survey of the heating and hot water arrangements across its 675 hotels. The two organisations are also collaborating on a trial of fuel cell CHP technology.
 
The two-year trial is seen as a vital step towards the wider adoption of fuel cells in the UK commercial heating industry. It is also the first UK-based trial under the European Union’s Ene.field scheme, which is contributing 40% of the costs. Baxi and Whitbread are jointly funding the balance.
 
The Gamma Premio fuel cell, built in Germany at the headquarters of Baxi Innotech, is one of the first two appliances to be trialled under the Ene.field programme, which will eventually monitor 1,000 installations across the whole of Europe.
 
The unit was installed in Whitbread’s Glastonbury Premier Inn, which opened in January 2013. It has high occupancy throughout the year so was seen as offering ideal trial conditions of high hot water demand – particularly in the morning and evening – amounting to around 3,000 litres per day.
 
The fuel cell works by extracting hydrogen from the natural gas supply and converting it into water, heat and steam all of which can be used to produce heat and electricity in a process that is almost 96% efficient and reduces the amount of fossil fuel needed to power the heating plant.
 
At Glastonbury the Baxi unit was installed between the cold mains supply and two existing Andrews Maxxflo condensing water heaters together with two buffer vessels. This arrangement means the fuel cell will provide approximately 20% of the total hot water demand of this busy hotel – around 700 litres per day.
 
The system has been configured to allow the fuel cell to run 24 hours a day, which will maximise its efficiency. It has its own 300-litre storage cylinder, which is heated first, before it moves on to supply the main system’s 500-litre pre-heat cylinder at 60degC. The ‘free’ electricity produced is used within the plant room to run pumps and other ancillary units further reducing the carbon footprint of the building.
 
Four engineers from Baxi Innotech travelled over from Germany to help with the commissioning of the system, which has now been running for three months showing very promising results. 
 
Analysis and predictions
Pre-commissioning analysis of the hotel and its hot water usage patterns, plus regularly updated operating data , have led Baxi and Whitbread’s energy team to predict overall savings of £16,890 over a ten year operating period with CO2 emissions likely to be reduced by 5.8 tonnes per annum.
 
Heat meters have been installed on the mains and water supply and a gas meter is also continually recording the level of fuel consumption. The electricity generation is also being recorded and contributes to the carbon reduction results.
 
The metering enables engineers to make very accurate recordings and also analyse parasitic losses in the secondary return so they can build up a more comprehensive picture of the overall performance.
 
Engineers at Baxi Innotech are continually monitoring the installation via a built-in internet link from their laboratory in Hamburg.  As well as closely analysing the performance, this also allows them to alert Baxi’s service team in the UK to any potential maintenance issues.
 
The Maxxflo water heaters and the fuel cell are being independently metered to allow the Whitbread team to make meaningful comparisons. The heat output from the fuel cell itself is directly recorded via a heat meter installed on the outlet from the 300-litre buffer vessel that monitors the temperature difference between the flow out of the buffer vessel and the return to the fuel cell.
 
A second heat meter is also installed on the secondary DHW flow and return reporting the system losses from the secondary circuit which allows the Innotech engineers to calculate the total system efficiency. A third heat meter measures the total energy needed to raise the cold feed to the DHW outlet so that the total energy used can be recorded. The electricity produced by the fuel cell is also being measured.
 
At the end of the two-year trial the fuel cell and buffer vessel will be de-commissioned and returned to Baxi Innotech for evaluation. The original 500-litre storage vessel will remain in place. Whitbread can then decide if they want to proceed with a permanent fuel cell installation or to replace it with another renewable technology.
 
“We envisage a promising future for this technology,” said Mitesh “The results so far are very encouraging. This trial will allow us to make informed decisions based on our own experience in a fully operational hotel, which is so much more meaningful than lab-based testing.
 
“CHP supplied by Baxi Commercial is already playing a part in our low carbon energy strategy and we are hopeful that fuel cell powered units will have a key role in the future,” he added. “We really value our close working relationship with Baxi as it allows us to develop a deeper understanding of emerging technologies and their potential.”
 
Baxi Commercial’s business development manager Neville Small added that site-based trials also allowed the company’s engineers to iron out any practical, operational issues.
 
“We are extremely grateful to Whitbread for allowing us such open access to their premises. This means we can closely monitor the equipment and fine tune its performance to suit actual demand,” he said. “The future for fuel cells is bright and we are delighted to be at the forefront of this important technological advance.”
 
CHP at Premier Inn
As well as fuel cell CHP at Glastonbury hotel, Whitbread is including CHP in all of its new hotels including 5.5kW Dachs units plus the newly available Dachs Pro 20kW unit deployed in Premier Inn’s new compact hotel format, ‘hub by Premier Inn’, on St Martin’s Lane, in the heart of London’s West End.
 
Mitesh and his team have approached the projects from an integrated design standpoint as they want to get the best overall solution for each hotel. This means they seek to marry low carbon technologies with conventional gas-fired heating equipment to get the best out of both.
 
Dachs mini-CHP units, manufactured and commissioned by Baxi, are therefore installed and operating in a number of Premier Inns. These are being carefully monitored to evaluate how CHP contributes to cutting the group’s fuel bills and carbon emissions.
 
The Premier Inn Croydon is a particularly successful example because the hot water demand for its 168 rooms means the CHP is operating 24-hours a day. This is reducing the buildings carbon footprint by 30 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum emphasising the importance of correct design, installation and commissioning to achieve the best results.
 
The peak period is between 7am and 9am when residents’ showers are in heavy use. Electricity is used throughout the day for lifts, lighting, TVs etc. so a CHP system delivering a steady 5.4kW along with large amounts of hot water has a strong appeal to the Whitbread team.
 
All Dachs units can be remotely monitored via a modem link so Whitbread can study running hours and overall efficiency. Whitbread is also planning more hotels close to airports where traffic in and out of the building is almost constant over 24 hours – again ideal conditions for operating CHP.
 
There is huge potential to increase this dramatically and provide a reliable, low carbon alternative to inefficient, centrally generated power. Large organisations with significant property portfolios, like Whitbread, can make huge running cost savings and simultaneously reduce their carbon footprint by generating electricity and hot water side-by-side close to where they are needed.
 
Clearly there are financial benefits to the group in reduced running costs and improved payback on much of their environmental technology. Also, planning rules are an important consideration for any hotel chain and CHP is a good way of meeting energy and low carbon targets set by local authority planning officers.
 
However, Whitbread has also had to make a sizeable financial investment upfront to trial the equipment and has dedicated major staff resource to monitor performance that will benefit the wider hospitality and heating industries in the long run.
 
This commitment made by a client, who is also willing to allow heating engineers access to its wide portfolio of buildings to verify test results, is a huge benefit to the CHP industry and, therefore, seems to merit ‘champion’ status for the man leading this far-reaching project – Mitesh Panikker.