Safety in Numbers
Brighter Planet's blog
Meet our turbocharged lodging model
We’ve just rolled out the latest version of our hotel energy and emissions model, and it includes a number of new advancements that make lodging sustainability quantification more accurate, broadly applicable, and useful than ever before.
Corporate travel is a fast-growing focus for sustainability managers, and we’re excited about the opportunities these new capabilities will give CM1 clients to empower smarter decision-making in this area.
This latest version includes four major upgrades:
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Integration of the massive Northstar hotel database. Ian previously posted about our acquisition of this huge and detailed international hotel properties data set. Today’s update integrates this data into the lodging model, letting users model energy use and GHG emissions for stays at tens of thousands of specific hotels around the world – tourism and business travel applications can now compute sustainability data based on building information from the actual hotels on their itineraries.
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Improved climate data. Local climate is a key predictor of the energy efficiency of a hotel room, as it drives heating and air conditioning needs. This release adds nuance to the climatic portion of the model using climate normals data from World Resources Institute’s (WRI) CAIT database.
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New CBECS fuzzy set analysis. Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) data from the US EIA has long been central to the lodging model, but we’re now using more advanced big data analysis techniques to make powerful estimates of hotel energy consumption based on factors like a hotel’s construction year, size, and climate control infrastructure.
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Amenities-based differentiation. The broad brushstrokes of climate and building infrastructure are key in painting the picture of a hotel’s energy use, but so too are details about specific energy-using appliances. The lodging model now takes information on amenities like fridges, minibars, hot tubs, and swimming pools into account, helping provide even sharper contrast among seemingly similar hotel options.
You can test drive the lodging model via our query builder or our API.
What blog is this?
Safety in Numbers is Brighter Planet's blog about climate science, Ruby, Rails, data, transparency, and, well, us.
Who's behind this?
We're Brighter Planet, the world's leading computational sustainability platform.