But Ohana Real Estate Investors, the hospitality-focused investment and development firm that owns the Montage Beverly Hills, wanted to raise the bar even further by uncovering new sources of financial value while improving the asset’s environmental performance.
Maintaining luxury amenities to meet the high expectations of guests can be costly, and Ohana was interested in finding ways to minimize OPEX, and energy spend in particular.
Meanwhile, we needed to ensure that OPEX projects were implemented as smoothly as possible so as not to inconvenience guests or detract from their experience.
Located in the heart of the Beverly Hills “Golden Triangle” shopping district, Montage Beverly Hills boasts more than 200 guest rooms, signature restaurants, a rooftop pool with cabanas, a 20,000 square foot, two-level spa and over 20,000 square feet of event space.
As Forbes noted: “In pure square-foot, ROI terms, Montage Beverly Hills may just be sitting on one of the most prized pieces of hospitality real estate in Los Angeles. The hotel’s zip code — 90210 — is one of America’s most prestigious.”
Ohana takes a data-driven approach to identifying value where others might not. Naturally, this made them a great match for Carbon Lighthouse, where we follow the same modus operandi. Understanding that Efficiency Reserves could be a valuable source of new guaranteed financial value, we got to work on the property.
Technical Details
What do you do when all of the low-hanging (and even middle-hanging) energy efficiency fruit is gone?
We faced an interesting challenge in that Montage Beverly Hills was a relatively new building and boasted top-of-the line equipment and a great facilities team.
Fortunately, our proprietary, patent-pending CLUES® software platform enables us to process vast quantities of original, site-specific data that helps our engineers identify the scattered energy inefficiencies that add up to significant savings.
- The biggest opportunity we uncovered was in its central plant, where the building’s chiller, cooling tower and pump work together:
- We discovered an opportunity to optimize chilled water plant efficiency by increasing condenser pump speed. Higher pump speed allows all other equipment to run more efficiently, creating a net reduction in energy usage.
- We also made small changes to fold in lighting measures and other methods for running the pump more efficiently
- Using our data-driven process, we uncovered that the hotel’s three identical cooling towers were working at different rates. We were able to correct this by optimizing their performance so that they were all working at equal rates.
Results
- Immediately cash-accretive, with significant first year savings
- Improved NOI
- Total energy bill reduced by 8%
- Lifetime carbon reduction of 1,789 tons, the same as avoiding the use of 4,142 barrels of oil
At a luxury hotel like Montage Beverly Hills, there is no room for anything less than seamless – hotel owners cannot afford to risk guest disruption. Because Carbon Lighthouse operates only in the engineering areas of a building, we can provide Efficiency Production without touching common spaces guests frequent.
“Our experience working with the Carbon Lighthouse team was seamless,” said Joe Ward, VP of Asset Management at Ohana Real Estate Investors. “They analyzed and studied our issues, performed extensive research to rectify the situation, and then proposed an efficient and effective solution that could be easily implemented.”
With implementation at Montage Beverly Hills completed, we move into our Results Assurance phase to make sure that Ohana continues to receive the financial savings we projected.
Much to Ohana’s delight — and ours — we currently are over-delivering on energy savings, meaning more financial value for the client.
Because we charge a flat fee for our services, our clients realize additional revenue when we deliver more savings than expected, providing additional financial value as well as added climate benefits for the planet.
“The Carbon Lighthouse team delivers excellence in all they do – from our first interaction to our ongoing project updates, they never cease to impress us with their ability to seek out and create value through an environmentally conscious lens.”
“We appreciate their dedication and enthusiasm to our project and are very pleased with the end product.”
