Dubai’s hotels could save millions of dollars a year if they were to apply energy and water saving policies, the MEED Sustainable Cooling conference was told on 8 October.

UAE-based Farnek chief executive officer Markus Oberlin said that hotels consume 6 per cent of all the electricity used annually in Dubai and 4 per cent of the water. He said that major savings could be achieved through energy and water efficiency measures.

“The saving potential among city-centre five star hotels alone could be more than 10 per cent of total annual electricity bills,” Oberlin said. He said that was equivalent to AED 48m ($13m) a year. Savings of about $3m could be delivered to Dubai’s city centre five-star hotels.

Oberlin said that studies done by Farnek show that Dubai’s hotels use between 128 kWh of electricity per square metre to 343 kWh of electricity per square metre. He said that they were more efficient in using electricity than hotels in Portugal and Greece.

Oberlin called on Dubai hotels to seek green building certification; introduce energy management programmes and carry out energy audits to benchmark electricity and water use against peers in Dubai and elsewhere.