Most hotels have a building management system to keep the property comfortable and safe for staff and guests. Some also have building energy management systems to track their electricity expenditure.
But neither type of system is designed to optimise how your hotel uses, stores, and pays for electricity when there are solar, batteries, and other electrical assets on site. According to Knight Frank, utility costs averaged 5.6% of total hotel revenue over the rolling twelve months to Q3 2025, up from 4.4% in the same period in 2019. At those levels, even small improvements in how you coordinate your energy use make a measurable difference to the bottom line.
In this article, we detail the challenges hotels face with managing energy costs and how to get more commercial value from the energy investments they already have or are planning.
What most hotel energy management systems still miss
The hotel energy management market is still, to a large extent, fixated on one problem: room-level HVAC automation.
That focus is reasonable. A study by the UK Green Building Council shows targeting this one area delivers savings of up to 15% of total hotel energy bills and up to 30% of HVAC costs. For hotels spending six figures a year on energy, these percentages matter.
But it’s only part of the story. A significant share of your hotel's energy spend comes from loads that room-level controls never touch, like:
- Kitchens
- Laundry
- Hot water
- Lifts
- Back-of-house ventilation
- Pool plant
- Public-area lighting
- EV charging
There are some estate platforms that offer more, like E.ON Optimum. They show you live building performance, remote fault detection, and energy reporting across multi-site hotel portfolios on a single dashboard.
They can tell you where you’re using energy but don’t make decisions on:
- When a battery should charge and discharge
- When solar should be stored rather than exported
- How to schedule loads around electricity prices that change throughout the day
So, you get accurate reports but no way of turning that data into lower costs.
This disconnect between data and action matters more than ever, now that hotels across the UK and Ireland are adding solar, battery storage, and EV charging en masse. Village Hotels, for example, is installing 380 ultra-rapid IONITY charging points across all 33 of its hotels in Great Britain.
These are significant additions to any site's electrical profile. But solar, batteries, and EV chargers all change when and how a hotel uses or produces electricity, and none of them fit inside the control systems most hotels currently have.
The problem is not that room controls and estate dashboards are useless. The problem is that neither can control what the whole site spends on energy when you introduce solar, storage and variable pricing.
What hotels with solar and battery plans need instead
Investing in solar and battery projects is a major capital expense for hotels. You will benefit from payback, but without the control systems, it will be a struggle to achieve the level of savings you hoped for or were promised.
When hotel energy assets aren't coordinated
Most hotel energy assets run independently of each other, with nothing managing them as a single system.
The battery charges from the grid at full price because that is what its schedule says to do. Meanwhile, the solar array is generating power that no other system on site has been told to capture, so it exports to the grid at a fraction of the value. And something as routine as guests charging their EVs can spike peak demand and trigger higher charges from your supplier for the entire billing period.
Hotels already consume a lot of power. The Irish Hotels Federation sustainability guide puts typical consumption at around 360 kWh per square metre per year, with heating alone accounting for more than 40% of energy use.
Separately managed assets add avoidable cost on top of that, and you already see this in higher bills. That is what coordinated scheduling is designed to solve.
Making decisions based on what electricity costs right now
Most hotel battery systems follow the same charge and discharge pattern every day and have done so since the date of installation. That set-and-forget approach takes no account of:
- Electricity costs at any given hour
- Weather cutting or boosting solar output
- Hotel occupancy levels
GridVolt's tariff-aware optimisation changes that. It automatically makes charging, discharging and scheduling decisions based on what electricity actually costs at different times of day. The software forecasts site load and solar generation 48 hours ahead, updates those forecasts 96 times a day, and replans every 15 minutes using the site's actual tariff inputs to reflect real operating conditions.
As a result, when we modelled our scheduling engine against nine months of real electricity pricing data at a mid-sized commercial site, the effective rate dropped from 18.5p to 14.4p per kWh.
Proving the assets are doing what the business case promised
The current limitations of BMS and BEMS mean most hotels have no way of proving whether their solar array or battery is delivering the return the original business case promised.
You, as CFO, need to prove that the investment is paying back so you can make the case for the next energy investment. The facilities team needs to see that the system is working so guest comfort and safety aren't compromised by the way the site manages its energy.
Without the figures, you have no way of knowing whether the investment is paying back or quietly underperforming.
How solar and batteries change the economics of hotel energy management
How your solar and battery project investment changes hotel energy management economics depends on what you already have on site and what you're planning next.
If your hotel already has solar
You're already saving money on electricity. But most hotel solar arrays generate their peak output around midday, and the heaviest loads often come later in the day.
Any generation your hotel doesn't use at the time goes back to the grid at a fraction of what you'd save by using it yourself. The question is whether the software controlling your site can capture that value instead.
If you are considering battery storage for your hotel
If you're evaluating a battery project for your hotel(s), the commercial case comes down to three things:
- Storing cheaper power for expensive periods. The battery charges from the grid or from solar when prices are low, releasing it when rates are high.
- Flattening demand spikes. Some tariffs charge you based on your single highest spike in electricity use, meaning that half or quarter hour sets the rate you pay for the rest of the billing period. A battery absorbs that spike before it hits your grid connection.
- Supporting new electrical loads. EV charging adds significant extra demand on your supply. A battery can meet part of that demand without the need for an expensive grid upgrade.
A battery running on a fixed schedule will capture some of that value but one responding to live tariff data, forecast demand and solar output will capture significantly more.
Invest NI data puts typical hotel electricity use at 6,305 kWh per room per year. At that rate, even a few pence per kWh saved through better scheduling adds up fast across a 100-room-plus property.
Two countries, two different approaches
The savings you can achieve depend on whether your hotel is in the UK or Ireland. Here’s how the two differ:
For UK hotels
Average non-domestic electricity prices including the Climate Change Levy reached 24.3p per kWh in Q2 2025, enough to push a mid-sized hotel’s electricity bills into six figures.
In addition to on-site cost savings, the P415 rule change, which took effect in November 2024, means you can now appoint a specialist third party to manage battery trading on your behalf without switching energy supplier. If you have a compatible battery of around 100 kWh or more on a half-hourly meter, you can earn revenue from wholesale markets that were previously closed to you.
GridVolt modelled a mid-sized commercial site against nine months of real Octopus Agile pricing data. Without a battery, the effective rate on the wholesale tariff was around 18.5p per kWh, with full exposure to price spikes.
With a 400 kWh battery and GridVolt's scheduling engine, it dropped to 14.4p per kWh, with the battery absorbing the spikes. The average UK commercial electricity rate is around 23p per kWh, so this combination of a wholesale tariff and intelligent scheduling reduces costs by around 38% compared to what most businesses pay on a standard fixed contract, while removing the volatility risk that makes wholesale tariffs feel dangerous.
The modelled payback was 3.8 years. This is not hotel-specific data, but the principle applies to any site with predictable, high energy consumption, which describes most hotels.
For Irish hotels
According to SEAI, Irish business electricity prices reached 24.27 cent per kWh in the first half of 2025, among the highest in the EU.
Solar investment in the country is accelerating. Ireland added 1 GW of new solar capacity in 2025 alone SEAI offers a non-domestic solar PV grant of up to €162,600. Ireland doesn't yet have the trading revenue available in Great Britain. But the return on your solar still depends on how much you use on site and how effectively your solar and battery work as one system.
Is your current setup basic, partial, or joined up?
This framework helps you place your current setup and decide whether your systems are working hard enough for the money you've spent:
| Basic | Partial | Joined up | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Controls | Room controls or plant controls only with no coordination beyond the BMS | Some automation across the building, but each asset follows its own rules | One system in charge of HVAC, hot water, solar, battery, EV charging and tariff timing |
| Solar and battery | If present, managed separately with no link to the rest of the site's energy use | Connected to monitoring but not coordinated with other loads or electricity prices | Generation, storage, and consumption managed together based on live conditions |
| Tariff response | The site pays whatever the tariff charges are regardless of when it uses power | Some time-of-use awareness, but the charge and discharge schedules rarely change | Scheduling that adjusts automatically when prices, demand, or generation change |
| Commercial visibility | No way to measure what energy assets save or cost. | Some reporting exists, but hard to see whether assets are delivering what was promised or hoped for | Facilities and finance can both see what the assets are delivering and whether the investment is paying back |
The missing layer in hotel energy management
Hotel energy costs are rising and the tariff structures behind them are becoming more complex. Getting the most from solar, battery, and EV assets means coordinating every system on site around live prices, weather, demand and occupancy.
Most hotels do not have this setup in place yet. If your site already has solar and battery storage, GridVolt's software connects to nearly all existing battery systems. If you have solar but no battery, GridVolt can help you scope and commission the right storage setup.
Contact GridVolt for a compatibility check and site review. GridVolt can model your projected savings before any commitment. If you already work with a solar installer or EPC, ask them to contact us to add GridVolt to your project.