Sustainability of a five-star hotel, Okura Amsterdam

In each newsletter we highlight one of the members of the Building Automation sector. For the Bits, Bricks & Behavior 2021 conference, HE advisors described the sustainability master plan of the Hotel Okura in Amsterdam in an article on the site. This requires a lot of conceptual and specialist knowledge to arrive at the right solutions. Sustainable technology has been proposed in this hotel through a thorough analysis.

The hotel is a 25-storey tower containing the hotel rooms and various restaurants. Technical rooms are available in the basement, on the second floor and on the upper floors. Next door is the two-storey Banquetting building for organizing large conferences. Also with its own installation space. Both building parts are connected by a garage at basement level.

The hotel had a classic installation concept with low temperature cooling (2500 kW) and high temperature heating (4000 kW). The “Sustainability Master Plan” has initiated sustainable steps in the past six years:

The three cold stations, spread across the plot, are centralized in the basement of the high-rise building, consisting of a heat pump connected to two mono sources that also supply cold directly to the building. Supplemented with 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.

Due to the intensive relationship with HE advisors the results are continuously examined and further improvements are initiated. A good example of continuous improvement through the use of data and intensive collaboration between the parties involved.