Thursday, December 3, 2009

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Hotels check out energy savings By INDERIA SAUNDERS ~ Guardian Business Reporter ~ Inderia@nasguard.com: A consultant with the Ministry of Environment has announced a plan set to save local hotel owners and businesses energy costs, with a Bahamas Hotel Association (BHA) test group to try out the proposal over the next year. It's a program that will see the chosen hotels conduct energy audits on their properties over the next 12 months, with interval reports and recommendations for efficiency changes that can be made countrywide. "At the end of the exercise we're going to produce an audit tool that we can hand out to all hotels, private sector [businesses], residences or wherever it may be," Glen LaVille revealed at yesterday's National Association of Black Hotel Owners, Operators and Developers (NABHOOD) conference. "Persons can use [the tool] to self asses their energy efficiency and make changes in their operation and so improve their electricity demand." The NABHOOD event focused on finding and reviewing investment options in The Bahamas for entrepreneurs. In the last year, energy costs have been a major issue for many hotels around the country, prompting the CEO of Baha Mar Sarkis Izmirlian to publicly bemoan his hotel's soaring utility expense bill. The ministry's audit project comes under the national energy efficiency program the recently launched with a view to reducing the nation's dependency on crude oil. LaVille said the ministry was leaning more towards the implementation of the waste to energy methods of renewables. His statements comes as the Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC) officials announce that $1 billion was spent on importing energy into the country last year. Accounts payable and accrued liabilities (what BEC owes) were at $222.94 million as of September 2008 and BEC was owed nearly $80 million, according to the corporation's latest financial statement. The program, said LaVille, will have interim reports that will be released on a regular basis. "They take about 12 months, but we expect to have them every two months as we go along," he explained. "As we get them, we will make various parts of them available to the public to let them know what our findings are and what changes can be made in the interim." According to the Director of the Bahamas Environmental Science and Technology (BEST) Commission Philip Weech in an earlier article, over $1billion was shelled out all together in 2008 to bring oil into the country. "Indications are that in 2008 we spent just shy of $1 billion importing fossil fuels to drive this economy," said Weech. "That's about 10 percent of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) . . . that's a significant foot print." Friday, November 20, 2009