The building and the industrial sector in India are consuming approximately 70% of the total energy consumption in the country. It is interesting to note that there are several mandates and programs run by the private and government agencies to bolster the scheme of carbon mitigation in the industries, however, there are a very  only a few in the building sector and  which are being implemented in a discreet manner. One of the flamboyant programs launched by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) for the Indian industry is called “Perform, Achieve and Trade” (PAT) scheme with 70% coverage of 36% of total energy consumption by the industrial sector sought in the scheme. After the successful implementation of PAT Cycle I for industries and thereafter successive rolling cycle, it is now time to put our serious thoughts of inclusion of buildings in the PAT scheme .
Initially, it is planned to cover the commercial establishment in the very first phase under PAT regime of building sector as a whole. Although, energy consumption of the residential sector enjoys the share of around 24% from total building sector energy consumption of 35%, however the mandate in Energy conservation Act 2001 proposes for the inclusion of the commercial establishment under PAT because of following reasons
• Ease of Establishment of Specific Energy Consumption
• Data Streamlined for Energy Consumption and Efficiency
• Documents and Data availability
• Data Accessibility
• Regular Energy Audit
• Awareness in Energy Efficiency and Conservation

 

Under commercial building category, there are further classification of different non-residential building typologies and are broadly based on the National Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) of India such as Hospitality, Educational, Health Care, Shopping Complex, Business and Assembly. The energy efficiency depends on many variable parameters in different typologies of building including energy use with technologies and building material. Thus, the potential of energy efficiency under PAT totally depends on technologies used in installed equipment, Appliances and efficient use of power sources. It hardly fetches any savings in the building envelope apart from some innovated shading system, glazing or in insulation. However, the energy conservation and efficiency do have a bigger say in the overall SEC reduction of the total building concept under PAT.
When the zero down begins for searching out the commercial establishment to be included under PAT, following sub-sectors were considered for data audit in terms of energy consumption for finding out the threshold limit.
1. Hotels
2. Data Centers
3. Shopping Malls
4. Airport Terminals

 

 

 

 

Hotels play a very important role in India’s prosperous tourism industry and will continue its fast growth during the next decade. When compared to residential or office buildings, hotels usually constitute a relatively small proportion of the building stock in an economy. Nevertheless, both local studies and research conducted in other countries reveal that hotels are among the most energy intensive of all building categories. As a result, their energy use and environmental impact can be quite large.
Electricity is the primary energy source, which is used to power HVAC, lighting, vertical transportation, and almost all the equipment. Gas is mainly used for cooking and boilers, but due to more availability of gas for commercial use, it is common to use for power generation as well.  In hotels where only electricity and gas is consumed, the average proportions of two fuels are 91% and 9%, respectively. Some hotels also use diesel for standby electricity generation and hot water or steam generation. The former incurs small consumption, as diesel is consumed in regular test-runs of the emergency generator to ensure it works when in need as well as during load shedding.
The survey of energy in hotels estimated the energy savings potential which could be achieved by application of practical retrofitting techniques, materials or energy efficient systems. Hence, due to overall structure of the hotel industry and ease of data information, this sub-sector was considered to be a fit case for inclusion in PAT in the year 2018. Certainly, with the inclusion of Hotels in PAT, the overall awareness and investment in Energy Efficiency is going to be increased among the stakeholders ushering to the Energy saving and Carbon mitigation. It is expected to save 10000 toe with an investment of 240 Million Rupees. from the Hotel sub-sector under PAT by the year 2020-21 from the base year 2016-17.

 

Challenges

 

Yet, there are lots of challenges while estimating the specific energy consumption and targets for the hotel industry. The first one came for the adoption of Unit of comparison between the hotels because of wide acceptance of EPI methodology in terms of kWh/m2/year. While for Gate-to-Gate approach in PAT, it was necessary to adopt a terminology which should be accepted for different sources of energy like power, oil and gas in the boundary. Hence, a widely accepted terminology in PAT such as Specific Energy Consumption (SEC) w.r.t. built up area in thousand square meter has  been developed and called as toe/’000m2/year terminolog.
SEC is one of the energy performance indicators of a process and is defined as net energy consumed in tons of oil equivalent (toe) per thousand squares built up area after deducting the basement parking area in m2.
However, there are several factors that need to be taken into consideration to make a meaningful and logical comparison. Factors like occupancy rate in hotel rooms, foot falls in the recreational areas like gym, spa etc, meeting hall capacity utilization, power mix change, laundry services, ETP installation and gas consumption in dining area, etc. are few examples that can make this comparison difficult. Depending on how these factors change over the assessment period, the hotel Designated Consumers (DCs) may sometimes get undue advantage or may get penalized for no fault of theirs. Therefore, normalization is a way to overcome the above problem and it can be defined as a process of rationalization of energy of an establishment to take into account, the changes in quantifiable terms that impact energy performance under equivalent conditions over the assessment period.
The energy performance of a building is dependent on quantifiable variables, which are required to be normalized so that the actual energy performance could be quantified/ compared.

 

Hence, normalization is the biggest challenge while calculating the SEC under GtG methodology and shall be handled very carefully in the pro-forma itself. I will be discussing the Occupancy Normalisation in my next blog.