Newest and largest hotel in London will be ‘SuperGreen’

The new 1,021-room riverside Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel, with gorgeous views of the Houses of Parliament, has its sights set on becoming the greenest lodging construction by early next year. Park Plaza Hotels, owner and to-be-operator of the £350 million, heart-shaped, “SuperGreen” hotel, believes that sustainable environmental practices reflect the expectations and desires of its guests, employees, stakeholders and partners in business.

With almost 40 hotels in the UK, Europe, Middle East and Africa, the company is committed to finding and implementing ways to mitigate its environmental impact through its TREE (Total Responsibility for Everyone’s Environment) and SEASON (Save Energy and Switch Off Now) initiatives – focusing primarily on responsible water and energy usage as well as waste management.

Powering up to green

The Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel has initiated a tri-generation energy management scheme that will help to significantly reduce the amount of energy it draws from the electrical grid. The installation of a BioMass Boiler – using wood pellets to generate heat to guest rooms – utilizes sustainably generated wood pellets from managed forests and produces power that is carbon neutral.

The hotel plans to generate electricity through its Combined Heat and Power (CHP) Unit -  using natural gas to produce electricity and as a bi-product produces hot water for the hotel. For the hotel’s 1,200 square metre Westminster Ballroom alone, the CHP is expected to reduce the amount of energy drawn from the electrical grid by half. That hot water produced by the CHP also will be used by the hotel’s absorption chiller, the third component of the system. The absorption chiller system absorbs the hot water produced by the CHP Unit and chills it to produce cold water used in the hotel’s air conditioning system, significantly reducing the amount of cooling required by traditional coolers.

As one of the most unique energy-saving features of the hotel, a passive infrared movement sensors (PIRS) will be installed in all staff areas, all guest rooms, all public toilets and in fire escapes. Indiscernible to the guest, the highly sophisticated sensors are designed to switch off power when there is no movement in the area to keep energy usage to a minimum whenever possible.

In guest rooms, logic circuitry tied to magnetic door switches detects when a guest is not present in the room to switch of cooling and lighting. When a guest is in the room, the system remains switched on. In hotel meeting rooms, staff areas and public toilets, ceiling- mounted infrared sensors detect movement to switch on lighting only when needed. In addition, all projector lamps in meeting rooms are fitted with sensors and switch off when not in use.

Lighting the impressive property will be an estimated 25 thousand energy-saving LED light bulbs. By using these energy saving bulbs, the hotel will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an estimated 606 tons per year.

Keeping it cool

Over 120 of the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge hotel’s kitchen and bar fridges will be fitted with new technology to save energy even with the constant use of the refrigerators. With traditional thermostats, when a refrigerator door opens, the thermostat senses a change in temperature and switches on the compressor for additional cooling. New technology called E-Cubes provides a more accurate temperature reading and determines when additional chilling is actually needed to retain the right temperature which reduces the compressor’s load and saves energy.

And with stunning views of Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and to the City of London, the hotel measures up to even the loftiest green-luxury ambitions by staying energy-minded while offering arguably the best views in the city through triple-glazed windows -  rather than just two panes of glass, a third is introduced to further the window’s ability to insulate in winter and reduce heat in summer.

Water, water everywhere

The hotel will significantly reduce carbon emissions with its own on-site water bottling plant, which is expected to produce more than one million bottles of purified, triple-filtered drinking water each year while saving transportation of  deliveries of disposable water bottles. The water will be bottled in reusable glass bottles for use throughout the hotel from the guest rooms to restaurants to meeting rooms.

The hotel is also planning to utilize grey water through a comprehensive, property-wide rainwater irrigation system, to collect and divert rainwater from the roof to storage tanks. From there, the water will be used to grow plants in and around the hotel.

For more information, visit www.parkplaza.com/hotels/gbwestmi.