Environment / Energy

The need to save energy and to produce it from renewable sources is one of the essential aspects of any environmental strategy in building and infrastructure design, and comprises a plethora of actions that aim at reducing the amount of energy consumed and at improving energy independence.

There are many ways to save energy, starting from the very structure of the buildings and their insulation, walls, windows, etc where we have over the last two decades applied a wide-scale programme of continuous improvements (polyurethane coat insulation, double glazing, drywalls, etc). Having addressed structural issues, next come the electrical and mechanical ones, like the air- conditioning units, the refrigerators, the televisions and the lighting appliances, where the same programme includes a number of actions: Class A+ air-conditioners everywhere, wide scale replacement of lamps with LEDs and fluorescent tubes, as well as heat recovery from the central cooling systems (essentially, this is heat removed from the various areas of the hotel when it’s hot, which is then stored in hot-water vessels and used in the water circuits of bathrooms and kitchens).

In the field of energy production we have applied two main techniques in our hotels: the central active closed-circuit solar panel fields, positioned on the roofs of buildings and parking areas, as well as the production of thermal energy with sea-water heat pumps. Both methods store the thermal energy in central storage vessel, which is then managed by an electronic system that send it (via heat exchangers) to the hotels’ water circuits and heated swimming pools.