Cedar Court Hotels: A commercial solar journey.

A couple of weeks ago we caught up with Wayne Topley, the Managing Director of Cedar Court Hotels, to talk about how he’s powering his hotels!

UKE: Hi Wayne, want to introduce yourself?

Wayne: Yep, my name is Wayne Topley and I’m the MD at Cedar Court Hotel. 4 Hotels, 500 rooms, 300 staff. It’s easy to say … we are in hospitality.

UKE: We can imagine it’s pretty expensive to power 4 hotels.

Wayne:  We have 3 million pounds a year electricity and gas bill, hotels are not that efficient, it’s as simple as that.

And we will always have a need for lots of energy; you can’t really allow guests to be hot when it’s cold and cold when it’s hot.

So, fundamentally, our utility bills have always been quite a significant part of our cost base.

UKE: When did things start to escalate?

Wayne: After 2020 and all the different pricing challenges, we had to kind of materially make a change to how we produced our own energy. So solar was an easy way forwards.

UKE: Did it work?

Wayne: We've seen a significant reduction. Obviously, UK prices are volatile for utilities, but fundamentally we are now producing around 1/3 of our electricity usage for the hotel company, which is fantastic, makes a big difference to us.

UKE: Does producing your own energy effect the bottom line.

Wayne: It affects a whole world of things really. It effects our running costs. It affects some of the capital decisions we've made inside our business in terms of having that constant energy coming in. We can make different decisions around how we heat and how we provide utilities for our customers to use.

And I think more important than that, solar was a physical and tangible investment in our long-term sustainable strategy.

UKE: Do tax breaks help too?

Wayne: Tax is definitely a part of our consideration. Obviously, being able to write some of our taxes off to that capital investment does make sense, but it's the long-term returns of solar that were really attractive to us.

UKE: I guess it’s the long-term investment that really appeals?

Wayne: We know those panels will last US 25 years. Therefore, that ROI and that investment is over a much longer time and payback than you would normally see.

UKE: How do staff and customers react?

Wayne: We get lots of interest. We get lots of questions. People are asking us what we're doing and why are we doing it. So yeah, it makes sense.

Again, it's another one of those tangible examples of where people can see we're making a commitment for long term, which is good to be, as I will tell you, it's the right thing to do.

And I think people understand now that as a hotel, if we're doing that, our thought processes are in the future, in the right, in the right direction.

UKE: You never get any complains or sideways looks?

Wayne: I think everyone understands that solar is a potential way forwards. But people also relate those stories back to their own homes, don't they? What's the efficiency? What's the investment like? What happens on the installation? What's the payback?

So, yeah, we've had a lot of questions, and we've shared a lot of that information with our team. We've got 300 people that work in the business.

UKE: How did you start your solar journey.

Wayne: We spoke to a couple of companies, and they came up with all pretty similar solutions, but it for us it's about the install because these hotels are going to be here forever.

The big question for us was finding someone who's going to work with us on that install and make sure it's not going to disrupt our hotel like too much.

UKE: So, you tried Wakefield first to see how it went.

Wayne: We were able to understand; we could see that daily and hourly payback. We could see that cash flowing straight back into our business. So, it became a little bit more tangible.

It became a little bit more real life, and we could almost see that paring back of the electricity bill straight away.

So once we'd made the first investment, we could see that was very much a viable way forwards and we could we could see the results within days and weeks.

UKE: Good ROI then?

Wayne: And it's one of the best ROI projects we've done. The return we've seen, the investment has been one of the best investments we've made, as I've already said, in terms of time scales of return and that the return is instantaneous.

So, for that purpose, for that reason, it's, it's a perfect investment for us. It gives us some stability.

UKE: Did you get any government help?

Wayne: We were lucky enough in two of the properties to be able to get some grant funding as well through local government and local initiative. Not lots, probably 10 -  20% of the total cost, but it just helped and it helped the ROI return quicker.

UKE: What about maintenance?

Wayne: We maintain it. It's very, very little maintenance.

More importantly, just give us some consistency in how we can plan our business.