Climate Friendly Hotel opens in Copenhagen

Saturday, 21 November 2009 00:00

This week, Copenhagen’s new climate friendly hotel, placed in Ørestad Syd, opens its doors. The new green Crowne Plaza hotel is the first hotel in Denmark that meets the EU requirements for green buildings, Danish daily Berlingske Tidende reports. Maybe therefore, this is where heads of state and government will be staying during the Climate Change Conference in December.

The 85 metre high hotel has 366 rooms spread over 25 floors. The southern, eastern and western facades facing the sun are covered in ultra thin, high-technological solar power cells producing power. The rooms and the rest of the hotel are lit up by low energy light bulbs and LSD reading lamps. A cooling and heating system collects groundwater from 110 metres underneath the surface of the earth for cooling of the rooms during summer time. The water is kept in the ground to be used for heating the rooms in the winter time. Therefore, Crowne Plaza is almost self-sufficient in heating and cooling the hotel.

“Out of the 800 million DKK (108 million euro) it has cost to build the hotel, energy efficient solutions only account for five per cent,” says hotel manager Allan L. Agerholm. He furthermore adds that the 40 million DKK (5.4 million euro) in additional expenditure for sustainable solutions will expectedly yield interest through savings of energy. “We count on using half the amount of energy that a similar hotel that has not been built on our green concept would normally use,” he says.

Source: Berlingske Tidende, Denmark