Most hotels update their buildings and amenities every five to seven years, and every time they do it, the opportunity arises to cut energy consumption and boost sustainability. The hospitality industry is 47,000 hotels strong, and these buildings are among the highest energy consumers per square foot of architectural space in the United States. According to the Department of Energy, U.S. hotels average nearly $2,200 in energy costs per guest room per year.

Change is underway, however. 

In 2024, MGM Resorts International reduced carbon emissions for its Las Vegas properties by 40%, in part with a 640-acre, 323,000-panel solar farm. Other hotel companies such as Marriott International, Loews Hotels & Co. and Wyndham Hotels and Resorts have launched sustainability initiatives over the past year to reduce energy and water consumption.

Hotels nationwide are at various stages of addressing their energy consumption and its related costs. For many, the low-hanging fruit continues to be a matter of swapping out traditional incandescent lighting with LED fixtures that offer lower power consumption.

Sustainability on the Las Vegas Strip

Houston-based Fisk Electric Co.’s Las Vegas office has been helping many hotels and conference centers—on and off The Strip—bring down energy consumption by upgrading their lighting, said Anthony Sant, the company’s operations manager. Fisk Electric recently installed more than 120,000 linear feet of LED cove lighting on The Strip, replacing out-of-date luminaires. 

“This upgrade provides energy-efficient solutions while adding a new, fresh look to the existing spaces,” Sant said. 

Additionally, Fisk Electric has replaced more than 25,000 incandescent lamps in other properties to LEDs. This swap-out provides a smaller environmental impact and energy savings. While LED retrofits have been underway for years, the work is not finished. 

“LED lamps are longer lasting, up to 25 times longer than traditional incandescent bulbs,” Sant said. “Most of our customers understand the benefits of LED lighting and are starting to make it a normal request in the RFP bidding process.” 

The transition to LED is still ongoing, with “a plethora of buildings in Las Vegas that could use an upgrade,” Sant said. It’s a transition that also improves aesthetics in the city. 

“The lighting upgrade retrofit brings a whole new refreshed look. We forecast for some of the backlog there are more retrofits for LEDs that needs to be done,” he said.

Furthermore, electrical contractors are serving hotels with another sustainability effort by providing electric vehicle charging stations. Fisk Electric is installing more such stations for hotels at their valet areas, Sant said, adding that, “We’ve done about 45, and there’s probably another 100 to go.” 

The next wave of upgrades

“When it comes to energy-efficient upgrades or retrofits,” LEDs have done the heavy lifting in energy reduction over the past decade or so, said Michael Serour, vice president and general manager of smart HVAC company Verdant Copeland, Saint-Laurent, Quebec.

“That transition was reducing their energy consumption” by bringing down lighting costs, while utility companies were offering attractive incentives, as well, to help hotels make the switch to LED.

The new era aims at the next level of “low-hanging fruit”—controls.

Verdant’s conditions and climate-control systems are in use in about 8,000 buildings in the United States, tracking about 2 million smart thermostats. The company, a division of Copeland, aims for energy reduction through controls.

Manufacturers now offer a variety of technologies that target guest room occupancy and environmental controls. 

“The most popular ones are smart thermostats controlling the temperature in the room,” Serour said. 

Technology companies may use different strategies to determine if a room is empty.

Verdant employs a full solution for guest rooms that uses infrared and heat sensors to detect whether someone is in the room, and then enables an automatic response to adjust the thermostat accordingly. 

“When a room is physically empty, we’re actively turning down the heating or air conditioning to save energy and money, and, then as soon as the room becomes occupied again, the system restores the thermostat settings” to where the guests last left them, he said.

A rising number of incentives offered by utilities now encourage hotels to make guest rooms more intelligent. While the controls in each guest room operate independently, they create a wireless mesh to transfer data to cloud-based software through a gateway.

At Verdant, Serour said, “We developed a protocol at low frequency, which allows all of our thermostats to be a node in the mesh,” that are served by a single gateway. 

That limits the requirement for connected gateways to one per building, he said. As a result, a 500-room hotel could have many controls-based thermostats and a single gateway plugged in to manage the data.

To deploy a system like this, he said, “It’s really just as simple in most cases as swapping out your existing thermostats in each guest room to ours and then plugging in a gateway downstairs.”

However, retrofits aren’t the only application for the Verdant solution. Much of the company’s business is in new construction. Over the years, the company has taken its retrofit solutions and then standardized them for use in new buildings.

Legislation and incentives

Depending of the hotel’s location, there may be legislation in place that requires greater controls. New York City’s Local Law 97 Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction, which passed in 2019, requires owners to reduce their buildings’ emissions by 40% by 2030.

California has its own requirement known as Title 24, Building Energy Efficiency Standards, related to the way new buildings are constructed to meet sustainability and structural safety demands. 

With these kinds of requirements ahead, Serour said, “you can’t build a hotel where the AC, the heating or the lights just stay on when the room is empty.” 

Typically, retrofits happen regularly with or without sustainability concerns. Many hotels complete a renovation about twice every decade, and electrical contractors may see an opportunity to upsell to customers or act as channel partners to sell a new solution. For Verdant, contractors play an oversized role in promoting and deploying its systems. 

“A big category in our world of channel partners is electrical contractors,” he said. 

In many cases, electrical or mechanical contractors are buying and reselling products to their customers. 

“We often will develop partnerships with contractors who may know us from some work they’ve done in a new construction,” he said. 

According to Serour, in some cases, a building customer might ask the contractor “Hey, you know this is a problem I’m having with energy waste. Can you recommend something?”

When given such opportunities, he said, “Some of these contractors are proactive, they’ll go into a building and say, ‘You know there’s an opportunity for you to be more sustainable here.'"

Control integration

The next big wave for hospitality sustainability may be integrating controls for multiple energy demands in a single room, Serour said. Disparate systems can mean multiple occupancy sensors for features such as lighting, TV and HVAC.

“We developed lighting integrations,” Serour said, adding that these link to switches for appliances and systems in the room, “so that we can say, ‘The room is empty, make sure that the TV is off, make sure the lamp is off.’”

In the wider scope, an integrated system can provide intelligence about the building’s operation in real time and over the course of a week, season or year. 

The technology can identify trends such as which rooms are rented or unrented, occupied or unoccupied. Owners can then use that information to develop a more effective energy-management strategy. 

“Or maybe you’re being even more aggressive as far as turning down the heating and air conditioning in rooms that are not even rented. We’re constantly thinking about how to evolve and improve the value that we’re offering our customers,” he said.

Calculating the benefits

Sustainable retrofits are not just a matter of energy reduction, but guest experience, too, said Tyler Haak, vice president of sustainability and service for Schneider Electric, Boston. Hotels are aiming for refurbishments that can serve both goals. 

“Facility owners in the hospitality sector can reap benefits from retrofitting their buildings, which can include reducing their carbon footprint, increasing return on investment [ROI] and enabling more people­-centric operations,” Haak said.

For many facilities, it’s a matter of understanding where the problems and potential benefits lie. With that in mind, Schneider Electric offers a way to measure sustainability with its Building Decarbonization Calculator. Hotel owners and operators can use the calculator to evaluate energy-saving measures and emissions reductions quickly by preloading their building’s modeled data, including type and location. By running various retrofit scenarios, operators can then assess the ROI for upfront expenses, prioritize actions and align decarbonization efforts with financial goals, Haak said.

According to Haak, “With rising energy costs and increasing pressure to meet decarbonization goals, hotels are prioritizing efficiency by investing in building management systems, occupancy-based energy adjustments and renewable energy integration.”

Using the calculator, the operators can plan improvements and identify the funding they might be able to attract. 

And when it comes to guest-centric strategies, the calculator helps them identify ways that can please environmentally conscious guests.

For hotel owners looking for longer-­term fixes, Schneider Electric provides building management systems that integrate all building systems for comprehensive control, renewable energy integration such as solar panels, energy storage solutions, sustainable building design and advanced data analytics to optimize operations.

Whether the business is a luxury or boutique hotel, a large hotel chain or resort, “Ultimately, these solutions are being adopted by various types of hotels across the world, all aiming to enhance guest experience, operational efficiency and sustainability,” Haak said.

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