Hotels rank amongst the highest energy consumers in the tertiary building sector [4]. Improved service quality mandates that hotel buildings, facilities and installations are maintained to the highest standards, thus renovations are becoming common in order to keep up with competitivity. This offers great opportunities for promoting energetically efficient measures, exploitation of renewable energy sources (RES) and rational use of energy (RUE) in the hotel sector. The Balearic Islands are one of the first tourist destinations with about half million beds available. Many successful hotel companies that have emerged during the 70's and the 80's are now exporting their experience to other expanding destinations. The Balearic Government has studied about 200 hotels in order to investigate the levels of energy consumption and sustainability among them. This research has been performed with the intention of appreciating the opportunities of efficiency improvement of the energy facilities so as to supply, as much as possible, with RES the energy demand.
In this article, the authors estimated the saving potentials in the embodied energy and CO2 emissions, which could be achieved through a replacement of the most energy-intensive elements in a large building. The results showed that 75% of the embodied energy came from only a small group of the building components, that reductions from 14% to 29% in embodied energy values were possible with simple replacements and that between 1770 and 4160 tonnes of CO2 could be avoided to be emitted to the atmosphere, with budget increases lower than 8%.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.