Commercial energy for hotels & hospitality

Hotels ought to be well-priced accounts. Their load factor is excellent — steady draw across all hours, no weekend collapse — and that is genuinely cheaper for a supplier to serve. Many Houston hotels nonetheless sit on ordinary small-commercial rates, because nobody put the load data in front of a supplier and made the argument.

The complication is volume. Occupancy drives consumption, and occupancy moves with the season, the convention calendar, and in the Houston market with industrial turnaround schedules that fill airport and Baytown-area hotels for weeks at a time. A fixed contract written around an annual forecast has to tolerate that movement, and the width of that tolerance is a negotiable term that gets negotiated far less often than the rate.

For hotel groups, aggregation is the other lever. Several properties under one contract present volume that a single property cannot, and align renewal dates so the group is never negotiating from a holdover position at one property while comfortable at the others.

How hotels draw power

Continuous. Guest-room HVAC, corridor and exterior lighting, laundry, kitchen and pool equipment run around the clock, giving hotels one of the best load factors in commercial — and one of the most occupancy-sensitive volumes.

What drives the bill

• Guest-room HVAC, the largest single load and directly occupancy-driven
• Commercial laundry running daily
• Kitchen, restaurant and banqueting equipment
• Corridor, exterior and parking lighting running continuously

The term that catches this vertical out

Volume bands against seasonal occupancy. A hotel that swings sixty percent between shoulder season and peak can breach a tight tolerance band and pay a settlement charge that outweighs the rate advantage it signed for.

The Houston angle

Houston hospitality demand is unusually event- and industry-driven: medical centre visitors, convention traffic, cruise passengers through Galveston, and plant turnaround crews around the Ship Channel. Those cycles shape load in ways a generic hospitality assumption misses.

What we look at before shopping anything

The order matters. We read your existing position first, because roughly one account in five turns out to be on a contract worth keeping, and finding that out costs you nothing but tells you something worth knowing.

• Your current rate and rate type — fixed, variable, indexed, or a holdover rate you rolled onto when a contract expired.
• Your contract end date — the single fact that determines how soon anything can change and how much leverage you have.
• Early termination exposure — whether leaving early costs a fixed fee, a market-based calculation, or nothing at all.
• Your load shape — the pattern described above, taken from interval data rather than assumed from your business type.
• The split between supply and delivery — so you know what proportion of the bill is genuinely in play before anyone talks about savings.

Natural gas as well

Hotels with cooking, process heat, water heating or boiler load frequently spend more on natural gas than the operator expects, and gas supply is shoppable on the same basic principle as electricity — a competitive supply component sitting alongside a regulated delivery charge from the local gas utility that nobody can change. If you have both, it is worth looking at both. How commercial gas brokerage works