Three of the standards in this series ask an organisation to manage something. This one asks it to move a number.

That difference is not a matter of emphasis. A quality system can be conforming while the product stays exactly as good as it was. An environmental system can be conforming while the impacts remain where they were, provided they are controlled and the commitments are met. This standard requires the organisation to demonstrate continual improvement of its energy performance — and a system in which nothing has improved is not a system that has been badly implemented. It is a system that does not conform.

Everything in this book follows from that sentence. It is why the baseline matters more here than in any other discipline, why an indicator that can be achieved by doing nothing is a defect rather than an imperfection, and why so much of what follows is about measurement in a building that was never designed to be measured.

There is a second difference and it belongs to the subject rather than to the standard. Energy is the only thing a hotel pays for every single day and decides once every fifteen or twenty years. The bill arrives monthly and is negotiated annually; the consumption behind it was settled when somebody chose a machine, specified a fitting, signed a concession or wrote a schedule — often years earlier, often in four days, often by somebody who was solving a different problem and did not know that this was also a decision.

That asymmetry is the reason an energy management system in a hotel so often produces effort without result. The effort goes where attention naturally goes, which is the recurring cost. The result was determined somewhere else entirely, by a process that nobody has connected to any of it.

This volume builds the system from the position of the people who own the property and run it. The first chapter is what ownership decides: the context that cannot be chosen, the parties whose needs shape what has to be demonstrated, the policy, the indicators, the baseline, the significant uses, the review from which everything else derives, the risks, the objectives, the competence, the resources, the management review, and the last question an owner faces — what may honestly be said in public about any of it. The second chapter is what management does with those decisions: the operating criteria, the measurement plan, the design and procurement moments, the maintenance, the hours, the concessions, the people, the documents, the deviations, the obligations and, finally, the holding of what has been gained.

The companion volume examines the same system from the two positions that have to be convinced it works. Everything in this book is what a property does. Whether any of it is true is a different question, asked by different people, and it is not the subject here.

Who this book is for

The owner or asset manager who approves an equipment purchase without being told it is an energy decision. The general manager who receives an indicator every month and has never been shown what would move it. The chief engineer who is competent and holds authority over none of the three decisions that set the number. The purchasing officer who negotiates a unit price with great skill while somebody else writes the other half of the invoice. The head of department who is asked to take responsibility for a consumption nobody can measure at the boundary of their department. And the person — there is usually one — who runs the energy management system alongside another job, in whatever hours are left.

Three facts about hotels govern everything in this book. The first is that a hotel consumes when it sells nothing. Roughly half of what a building draws does not depend on whether a single room is occupied, which means that the indicator the whole industry uses — consumption per occupied room night — improves whenever the commercial team succeeds, and tells an owner almost nothing about how the building is being run.

The second is that the building never closes, and therefore is never observed from scratch. A factory stops, a school empties, an office has a weekend. A hotel runs continuously, every day resembles the one before it, and the only comparison anybody makes is with yesterday — which is precisely the comparison that a slow deterioration survives indefinitely.

The third is that the decisions which determine consumption are taken by people who never see an invoice. A designer specifying a bathroom fitting, a chef switching on at a quarter to six, a concessionaire extending his opening hours, an engineer lowering a set point for a guest who asked — each of them acting correctly, on criteria that are legitimate, in a document or a moment that nobody has connected to energy.

To these the standard adds a fourth, and it is what separates this discipline from the others in the series. Performance improvement is not an outcome the system hopes for; it is a requirement the system must demonstrate. That obligation falls on a property whose consumption is largely fixed by decisions already taken and whose remaining room for manoeuvre lies in hours, schedules, settings and habits — which are cheap to change, invisible to measure, and held by people whose job is something else entirely.

What this book is, and what it is not

It is a practitioner’s guide to building and running an energy management system in a hotel. It is not consultancy, it does not sell a template, and it will not tell you whether your property is compliant — nobody who has not read your own consumption data can tell you that. It is also not an engineering manual. There is nothing here about sizing a chiller or selecting a heat recovery unit, because those are questions for a different profession and because the decisions that actually govern a hotel’s consumption are almost never technical ones.

Where the book states what is required, it states it as a requirement. Where it recommends a method, it says that it is a method and that other methods will do. The distinction is kept visible on the page rather than in a footnote, because the amount of documentation produced in this industry against obligations that do not exist is the single largest waste this book can help a reader avoid.

Every case in it is composite. Thirty properties in thirty cities, none of them a report of any real hotel’s history, each assembled from patterns that recur across four decades of work in international hospitality. Every financial figure is a modelled estimate and is declared as one wherever it appears; none of them is a sector benchmark, because the sector does not publish them and figures that are presented as benchmarks in this field are almost always something else.

The climate in each case is not decoration. Energy performance is the one discipline in this series where the location changes the problem rather than the setting — a building in Reykjavík, one in Muscat and one on the plateau at Nairobi have different largest uses, and a method built for one of them will mislead in the others. Where a case turns on a climate, the book says so.

The fixed elements of a subchapter

Every subchapter carries the same four. A Guiding Question opens it, and is the question the subchapter exists to answer; each one can be applied to your own property today, and each carries a time or a count, because a question that cannot be attempted in an afternoon will not be attempted at all.

What the Standard Says sets out the applicable requirement in the book’s own words, never in the standard’s. This volume rests on the standard throughout — unlike the second chapter of some others in this series, every requirement discussed here is one that binds the organisation itself, and the edition it is written against is stated in the Sources.

The Verification Pact runs a claim commonly made in the market against what actually holds. It is the discipline the whole series is built on, and it is deliberately the shortest thing on the page: six lines, no argument, no qualification.

Two tables then close the practical section. The first sets each requirement against what would demonstrate it in a hotel — which document, which record, which figure, which conversation — and, in a third column, against what is not being asked for at all. That third column is the one to read twice. The second table is the instrument of the subchapter: the thing a reader can take to their own property and use on Monday. Neither is a checklist. Several of them are deliberately left with a column empty, because the emptiness is the finding.

A fifth element is not a heading and appears throughout. Every subchapter closes its practical section with the case that runs the other way — the obvious correction that produces the opposite failure. The property that abandons ratios and can no longer tell growth from waste. The one that meters everything and answers no more questions than before. The one that writes forty operating criteria for a workforce that turns over every April. The one that refuses a viable solar installation because it would not improve the indicator. These are not rhetorical balance. Over-application is how a good part of the failure described in this book was built in the first place, and a reader who takes the argument without its inversion will build some more.

A note on words

This standard distinguishes several things that the industry routinely merges, and four of those distinctions decide whole subchapters of this book.

Energy performance is a measurable result relating to energy efficiency, energy use and energy consumption. Efficiency is a ratio between a result and the energy put in. Use is how the energy is employed — ventilation, lighting, heating, cooling. Consumption is the quantity used. A property can improve its efficiency while its consumption rises, and both statements can be true at once; keeping the four terms apart is what makes such a sentence readable rather than suspicious.

An indicator is a measure of energy performance, and a baseline is the quantitative reference against which it is compared. The first tells you where you are and the second decides what that means, which is why a book about improvement spends an entire subchapter on how a reference period is chosen and who chooses it.

A relevant variable is a quantifiable factor that significantly affects energy performance and changes routinely — the weather, the occupancy, the covers served. A static factor affects performance and does not change routinely — floor area, room count, installed plant. The first is what you normalise against. The second is what tells you when a comparison has stopped being valid, and confusing them is the most common way a property comes to believe something about itself that is not the case.

And two distinctions belong to the standard’s own vocabulary rather than to the subject, and both are easy to read past. To consider something means it must be thought about and may then be excluded; to take it into account means it may not be excluded. And continual improvement is not continuous improvement: the first implies occurrence over a period of time with intervals of interruption, and the expectation is that improvements occur periodically rather than without pause. Two subchapters of this book turn on those two sentences, and both of them are in the standard’s own guidance, where almost nobody looks.

Opening

The highest consumption per square metre in the building belonged to an operation the hotel could not instruct, could not measure and paid for in full.

The property is a hundred and fifty rooms in Baden-Baden, and its spa — pool, saunas, steam rooms and treatment cabins — had been operated under concession for eight years by a specialist company that ran three such facilities in the region and ran them well. The arrangement suited everybody. The operator paid a fixed fee plus a share of revenue, brought a clientele the hotel did not have, and relieved the property of a business it had never been good at. The hotel provided the space and the utilities, which the agreement described in four words: utilities included in the concession.

Annegret Vogel had been running the energy management system for three years and had never had a figure for the spa, because there was no meter on it. Its heat came off the main circuit, its electricity from a board that also served part of the back of house, and its water was on the property’s supply. Preparing the energy review update, she calculated the spa’s consumption by subtraction: total consumption, less everything metered, less everything reasonably estimable. The residual was larger than anybody in the building had supposed. It came to about twenty-two per cent of the property’s total energy.

Two things had happened over the eight years, both entirely proper. The operator had extended the opening hours twice, first by an evening and later by two hours on weekdays, in response to demand and to the competitive position of the facility — which is what a concession is for, and which increased the hotel’s revenue share both times. And the pool temperature had been raised by one degree in the fourth year, after guest feedback, by a manager exercising exactly the judgement his own business required of him.

Neither change was notified to the hotel, because nothing obliged notification and nothing suggested that either was the hotel’s concern. Neither was costed by the operator, because the operator does not pay for energy. And neither appeared in the hotel’s energy review, because there was no meter and no line of communication through which such a thing would travel.

When Annegret raised it internally the general manager’s first instinct was that the operator should have said something. Her own view, which she had to argue for, was that he had behaved exactly as the contract invited him to. A concessionaire who does not pay for energy and whose revenue rises with opening hours is being asked, by the agreement he signed, to maximise service and disregard consumption — and he had done so competently for eight years.

What she wrote for the owners is the whole of this subchapter. The spa is inside our building, inside our scope, on our bill and outside our authority, and the standard does not permit those four things to be true at once.

The Problem

The first failure is contractual and it is the origin of everything else. Four words — utilities included in the concession — transferred an unlimited quantity of energy to a party with no reason to limit it. The agreement was negotiated on the commercial terms that mattered at the time, by people thinking about revenue share and about who cleans what, and the energy clause was an afterthought that happened to be a blank cheque.

The second failure is that the incentives point the wrong way and point that way permanently. The operator’s revenue rises with opening hours and with guest satisfaction, and his costs do not rise with either. Nothing in that arrangement requires bad faith to produce growing consumption; it produces growing consumption when everybody behaves well, which is the characteristic of a badly aligned contract and the reason no amount of goodwill fixes one.

The third failure is that the hotel had placed the spa inside the scope of its energy management system, as it had to, without holding the authority to control it. The standard requires the organisation to ensure it has the authority to control its energy efficiency, use and consumption within the scope and boundaries. A significant use inside the boundary that the property cannot instruct is not a difficulty to be managed; it is a defect in the scope that has to be repaired either by acquiring the authority or by changing the arrangement.

The fourth failure is that nothing could be excluded to make the problem disappear. The standard says the organisation shall not exclude any energy type within the scope and boundaries, which closes the escape route most properties reach for — declaring the spa out of scope while continuing to pay its bill and operate the plant that serves it. The energy is in the building and therefore in the system.

The fifth failure is that there was no measurement, which made the whole thing invisible for eight years. A concession whose consumption is known can be discussed; one that is calculated by subtraction cannot even be raised, because the operator will reasonably dispute a residual and the hotel has nothing better to offer. Every conversation this subchapter recommends begins with a meter.

The sixth failure is that outsourcing had been understood as a transfer of responsibility rather than of activity. The definition in the standard is precise: although the external organisation is outside the scope of the management system, the outsourced function or process falls within it. The operator is outside. The spa is inside. Eight years of arrangements had proceeded on the assumption that both were outside, and nothing in the commercial documentation ever said otherwise because nobody had asked the question.

The seventh failure is that the shared plant belonged to nobody in particular. The heat serving the spa came off the property’s main circuit, which the hotel maintains, operates and pays for, and which the operator uses without instructing. When a circulation pump ran continuously through a winter nobody investigated it, because the hotel assumed it served the spa and the spa assumed the hotel was managing its own plant. A boundary drawn on a commercial document rarely coincides with a boundary drawn in pipework, and the gap between the two is where equipment runs for years without an owner.

Underneath all seven sits a proposition that a general manager will recognise from every other part of the business. A party that does not pay for something does not manage it, and no contractual obligation substitutes for an incentive. The remedy is not to police the operator; it is to change what the operator is optimising — which requires a meter first and a negotiation second.

The Principle

The standard defines outsourcing with unusual precision and the definition settles this subchapter. To outsource is to make an arrangement where an external organisation performs part of an organisation’s function or process. The note attached is the operative part: although the external organisation is outside the scope of the management system, the outsourced function or process is within that scope. The company is outside; the activity is inside.

That is reinforced from two directions. The organisation must ensure that outsourced significant energy uses, or the processes related to them, are controlled. And when determining the scope and boundaries, the organisation must ensure it has the authority to control its energy efficiency, energy use and energy consumption within them — which means authority is not optional, and a boundary drawn around something the property cannot instruct has been drawn wrongly.

The escape route is closed explicitly. The organisation shall not exclude any energy type within the scope and boundaries. A property cannot declare the spa outside its system while the spa sits inside its building, draws off its circuits and appears on its invoice. If the energy is inside the boundary, it is inside the system, and the system has to be able to reach it.   …