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Inn-charge: Premier Inn Trials UK’s First Battery-Powered Hotel

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‘The Gyle’ Edinburgh Park Premier Inn becomes the UK’s first battery-powered hotel in innovative trial

January 09, 2019 // Franchising.com // The Gyle at Edinburgh Park, Premier Inn, has become the UK’s first battery-powered hotel in a bid to improve energy efficiency, secure power supply and enable energy cost savings on-site.

In a UK-first, Whitbread-owned Premier Inn is trialling a new 100kW lithium ion battery at the 200-room site in Edinburgh, to help the hotel better manage its energy consumption.

The innovative battery, which is 3m3 in size and weighs approximately five tonnes, functions by drawing power from the National Grid during off-peak periods. It has capacity to run The Gyle hotel – including powering meals cooked at its Thyme bar and grill – for up to three hours.

The battery takes two hours to fully charge and will be used for at least 2-3 hours per day on-site, depending on the needs of the National Grid.

The Gyle at Edinburgh Park was chosen as the first site to trial the battery in part because Scotland is a large producer of renewable power, such as wind power, which can be prone to volatility. At such times, the battery will help the National Grid by reducing demand from the system.

As well as powering the Edinburgh-based hotel, the trial of the new battery storage system allows the Premier Inn site to avoid increased peak-time energy costs and generate revenue by offering energy support services to the National Grid - in essence, by being paid in exchange for taking power off the grid.

The installation is expected to save the hotel £20,000 per year in energy savings alone.

Project partner E.ON has supplied and installed the battery technology and will be remotely managing the battery’s workload and efficiency from its energy management centre in Glasgow.

Premier Inn is already the industry’s widest adopter of solar panels*, and the trial of the battery storage technology at its Edinburgh Park site marks another step towards meeting parent company Whitbread’s commitment to cut carbon emissions in half by 2025.

The hotel chain joins companies including B&Q and Veolia, which both installed lithium ion battery power systems earlier this summer.

Cian Hatton, Whitbread’s Head of Energy and Environment, said: “Batteries are of course everyday items, more commonly associated with powering small household goods, like the TV remote control, so it’s incredibly excited to launch the UK’s first battery-powered hotel – an innovation which will save money, ensure security of supply and support the transition to a more flexible grid”.

Richard Oakley, Customer Accounts Director at E.ON, added: “The Gyle at Edinburgh Park is already an energy efficient hotel thanks to the remote monitoring and management of its systems from our control centre in Glasgow. By adding the flexibility of battery storage we can also help Whitbread to upgrade to the full-board option of drawing electricity from the grid when prices are low, storing that energy for use at peak times and having the ability to sell it back to the grid to help balance supply and demand on the network.

“Premier Inn is showing how hotel chains and large power users can further save money, reduce their carbon footprint and support the development of a lower-carbon, smarter energy grid in the UK.”

If successful, the trial could be extended more widely across the Premier Inn estate.

*Premier Inn has more sites with solar panels than any other hotel chain in the UK, 169 in total.

About Whitbread

Whitbread PLC is the owner of the UK’s favourite hotel chain, Premier Inn as well as restaurant brands, Beefeater, Brewers Fayre, Bar + Block, Table Table and Cookhouse and Pub.

Whitbread is committed to being a force for good in the communities in which it operates. It’s sustainability programme, ‘Force for Good’ is focused on enabling people to live and work well and is built around three pillars of Opportunity, Community and Responsibility.

Whitbread has committed to a science-based carbon target (SBT), putting it on course to reduce carbon emissions intensity by 50 per cent by 2025 and as much as 88 per cent by 2050.

In the year ended 2 March 2017, Whitbread PLC reported an 8.2% increase in Group Revenue to £3.1 billion and Underlying Profit before tax of £565 million up 6.2%.

Whitbread PLC is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 100. It is also a member of the FTSE4Good Index.

About E.ON

E.ON is an international energy supplier focused on energy networks and customer solutions. Our business is built on these foundations because we believe they are the building blocks of the new energy world.

We provide solutions for this new energy world - decentralised, green, and interconnected – and we make sure that everything we do has a single focus: our customers, whether they are individuals or families, big or small businesses, or even entire towns and cities.

SOURCE Whitbread

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