Outsourcing energy retrofitting of hotel buildings: the decision-making process

Abstract

Poor energy performance of existing buildings worldwide has led to a crucial need to retrofit existing buildings to minimise energy consumption. Among the existing buildings, hotels use as much as 50% of their total expenses on energy and offer significant opportunities for energy efficiency improvement. Yet, comparatively the level of implementation of energy retrofits found to be low, which has attributed to, inter alia, the absence of a clearly defined process for ensuring the delivery of energy retrofit projects and lack of proactive guidance for project teams to ensure that they make the right decisions at the right time to achieve the desired outcomes. Since many energy retrofit projects in existing hotels are carried out with the involvement of an external contractor, or an Energy Service Company (ESCO), this study focuses on investigating the decision-making process in implementing energy retrofits when the project is outsourced to an external party. An in-depth case study is used to obtain insights into the critical decisions to be taken and key activities to be performed throughout the decision-making process. The findings are used to propose a step-by-step decision-making process comprising of three key phases: i.e., pre-retrofit, retrofit implementation and post-retrofit. It is hoped that the decision-making process developed in this study will serve as a roadmap for the effective adoption and implementation of energy retrofits in existing hotel buildings when an external contractor is involved.