Business energy for hotels & hospitality — where the pounds actually go

The hospitality load profile

Hotels, restaurants and pubs share a distinctive load shape: two demand peaks a day (breakfast/service and evening), heavy weekend and holiday usage, and a baseload driven by kitchens, refrigeration, HVAC and (for hotels) 24/7 corridor and public-area lighting. That shape has real contract consequences — evening peaks push you into Red-band DUoS windows, and weekend/holiday spikes make simple day-rate assumptions expensive.

Metering: are you HH or should you be

Most sit-down restaurants and small/mid hotels are on Profile Class 03/04 meters. Larger hotels, banqueting venues, hotels with laundries, and any hospitality site with peak demand over 100 kW cross the HH threshold (Profile Class 00). If you're close to the threshold and see excess-capacity charges on your bill, that's a signal to review whether HH would actually price more competitively.

Where the cost sits

For a typical mid-size hotel, kitchen and F&B account for 20-30% of electricity, HVAC 20-30%, lighting 15-25%, hot water 10-20% and lifts/plant the balance. Refrigeration alone can be 8-15% of restaurant/pub electricity, running 24/7. The efficiency levers with the biggest payback are almost always: LED across public areas, variable-speed drives on kitchen extract, and better hot-water controls.

Contract structure that fits hospitality

Most single-site hospitality operators fix — the operational focus is on service, not on managing wholesale exposure. 24-36 month fixes are the norm, and pass-through contracts rarely make sense until you're a multi-site group with dedicated energy management.

Multi-site hotel and restaurant groups benefit disproportionately from portfolio contracts: aligned renewal dates, consolidated billing per brand or per region, and portfolio-level pricing across the whole book. The savings vs. site-by-site procurement are usually a chunky percent of total spend.

Standing-charge sensitivity

Seasonal venues (beach hotels, ski chalets, event-driven pubs) with long low-usage periods are unusually sensitive to standing charges — the pence-per-day fee is charged 365 days a year regardless of trade. When we quote these sites we deliberately shortlist low-standing-charge tariffs even at slightly higher unit rates.

Green energy and guest expectations

Hospitality is one of the sectors where a REGO-backed 100% renewable contract has direct commercial value — corporate travel buyers, event organisers and OTAs increasingly ask about it. The premium over a standard contract is usually small; the marketing and RFP value is often larger. PPAs are only worth exploring for the largest hotel and pub groups.