Masterplan for sustainability of Hotel Okura Amsterdam
At the end of 2014, beginning of 2015, Hotel Okura in Amsterdam asked us to do a study on the sustainability of the installations within the hotel. At that time, Hotel Okura was already a client with whom we had had a partnership for decades.
For us, this was a great opportunity to show what specialist knowledge we also have in this area. Sustainability has, in addition to being a moral obligation, also increasingly become a revenue model and requires a great deal of conceptual and specialist knowledge to arrive at the right solutions.
Chic high-rise hotel
The hotel is a 25-storey tower with hotel rooms and various restaurants. Technical rooms are located in the basement, on the second floor and on the upper floors. Next to this is the two-storey Banqueting building for organising large conferences. Also with its own installation room. Both building parts are connected to each other by means of a garage at basement level.
It is a 5 star+ hotel, any interruption of the supply of cold, heat, ventilation and hot water is unthinkable 365 days a year.
Sustainable technology
The hotel had a classic installation concept with low temperature cooling (2500 kW) and high temperature heating (4000 kW). We are now 6 years after the drafting of the first report "Masterplan Sustainability" in which the following sustainable steps were taken:
The cold plant has been renovated: The three cold plants, spread over the plot, are centralized in the basement of the high-rise, consisting of a heat pump connected to two mono sources that also supply cold directly to the building. Supplemented by a magnetic centrifugal cooling machine where the condenser is connected to surface water from the adjacent canal.
4 of the 31 air handling units are adapted for high-temperature cooling and 7 units for low-temperature heating. This means that high-temperature cold from the source can be used directly and low-temperature heat from the heat pump.
All available roof surfaces have been used for installing PV panels.
The challenge for the near future is to decouple the hot tap water generation from the comfort installations within the building and to make all distribution and delivery systems suitable for low temperature heating and high temperature cooling. This process initially runs parallel to the multi-year maintenance plan and where the payback period allows, adjustments can be brought forward in time.
How sustainable the changes made are will have to be determined in the near future. It has become apparent that installations first need to be further adjusted to increase the efficiency of the plant and, in addition, there is no representative consumption of energy due to the Corona pandemic.
Nederlands