Dive Brief:
- Two Beverly Hills hotels — The Beverly Hilton and The Waldorf Astoria Beverly Hills — are now using ice-powered clean energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, energy storage solutions provider Nostromo announced Wednesday.
- Nostromo’s IceBrick technology uses cold-energy storage cells that save clean energy during off-peak hours to be used later during peak times. The hotels, which are beside each other, share a 1.4 megawatt-hour energy storage facility.
- The hotels are the first in the hospitality sector to use the IceBrick technology. The partnership comes as properties look for ways to reduce their carbon footprints in a bid to attract guests that are increasingly prioritizing more sustainable travel.
Dive Insight:
Nostromo’s IceBricks charge using grid power when renewable energy levels are high to freeze water into ice. The bricks then use the ice in the late afternoon and evening, when power demand is usually highest, to provide energy for cooling, avoiding the use of fossil-fuel based energy from the grid. Nostromo estimates that the implementation will cut the cost of cooling for the Beverly Hills hotels by 50% and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 150-200 metric tons annually.
“Hotels are [a] perfect fit for this technology, given their huge cooling loads,” Nostromo CEO Yoram Ashery told Hotel Dive. Many hotels, particularly in warm climates like California’s, cool their buildings around-the-clock, all year long, he added, majorly contributing to their carbon footprint.
Not to mention, those costs are expensive. The Department of Energy estimated that the average guest room in the U.S. incurs $2,200 a year in energy bills.
Energy storage not only combats high costs and carbon emissions — it also frees up energy for use elsewhere. As a result of the partnership, the hotels will have more capacity for EV charging, and also be able to tap into stored energy during outages.
The energy storage site, situated within an old mechanical room in The Beverly Hilton, will be transformed to educate guests “on how buildings can become a key player at the forefront of [the] fight against climate change,” Ashery noted.
Nostromo is currently seeking more hotel partnerships. The Beverly Hill project is a partnership between the company, hotels and real estate asset management groups Alagem Capital Group and Cain International.
