The Case for Energy Efficiency in Belize's Tourism Sector

Here are 3-approaches we recommend to incorporating energy savings measures in homes or businesses. The selected option depends on the Client's objectives and budget:

1. No cost action and maintenance: There are plenty of best practices that can be tailored and applied to any organization which can help trim their energy waste with nothing more invested than time and elbow grease. After auditing an organization, we typically start by identifying the low-hanging fruit and developing a suite of easy maintenance and operational protocols. Once these have been agreed to, the next challenge is to get everyone in the organization or the home on board through communication and education, and most importantly continuous monitoring. This level of intervention alone has been demonstrated to realize between 5%-15% savings in operational cost.

2. Low-cost or short payback actions: One of the easiest ways to reduce costs in any organization is better energy management. Using best practice methodology, we develop and cost out various energy options that can help companies reduce their costs and improve their profitability. Examples of this include switching out existing incandescent and fluorescent light fixtures to LED light fixtures, replacing AC units with inverter-type units, installing solar water heaters, and installing building controls to name a few. This level of intervention has a payback period of between 1-5-years and can yield savings of between 15%-30% in operational costs.

3. Higher-cost or longer payback actions: Renewable energy sources such as photovoltaics, solar thermal, wind, and geothermal AC systems carry longer-term paybacks because they're more costly to install than conventional energy sources, They could yield savings of 30%-50%, but their payback periods may extend to between 5-20-years or more. These longer paybacks are why this level of intervention is most often embarked on by the public sector. Access to finance is the biggest impediment to private sector investment at this level. The public sector can justify the longer payback since government buildings, city halls, schools, and health facilities will always be around serving their communities.

In 2016, Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) reported an aggregate sale of 541 GWh of electricity and energy revenues of $197 M. Of this:

• 52% (or $102.4M) was sales to the commercial sector

• 6% (or $11.8M) was sales to the industrial sector

• 37% (or $72.8M) was sales to the residential sector

• 5% (or $9.8M) of sales to the government for street lights

Services account for 52.2% of Belize's GDP. For the sake of argument, let's assume that half of BEL's sales to the commercial sector are for tourism assets - roughly $51.2M. "The IMF staff estimates suggest that an improvement of 1% in energy efficiency would be accompanied by an increase in GDP per capita by 0.2% in the long run."

A study carried out in Barbados concluded that air conditioning alone accounts for 48% of total electric consumption by hotels. By adopting energy-efficient technologies like smart window technology, energy consumption in the Caribbean can be drastically reduced. Lowering the overhead costs of hotels increases the competitiveness of our tourism product.

Currently, no data exist on the percentage of Belize's tourism accommodations that are air-conditioned, or the number of air-conditioners that are outdated or inefficient. For the sake of argument, if we assume that 48% of the $51.2M of electricity being consumed by tourism assets in Belize is for air conditioning, then those assets are spending approximately $24.6M on electricity for air-conditioning alone. By implementing:

1. A no-cost action and maintenance, these assets could save between $1.2M-$3.4M annually

2. By implementing a low-cost or short payback action, these facilities could save between $3.4M-$7M.

3. And by implementing the higher cost option, they can save between $7M-$12.3M

In 2016 the Statistical Institute of Belize reported that we had 8,212 hotel rooms. Implementing a no-cost action and maintenance strategy could translate into savings of $12-$35/month per hotel room. Implementing the low-cost or short payback action could yield savings of $35-$71/month per hotel room. By implementing the higher-cost option, the savings could be as much as $71-$125/month per hotel room.

Of course when evaluating the benefits of the low cost or short payback actions, one must offset the savings against the cost, but we feel all options could yield significant positive impacts by reducing the overhead cost of these facilities and increasing their competitiveness.