Tourism

Glazebrook Lodge provides its guests with an opportunity to visit an unspoilt part of backcountry New Zealand, but stay in luxury surroundings. Rather than running a cable to connect to the electricity network, which was going to cost in excess of $900,000, the lodge owners invested in a much more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly form of distributed generation on their own property.

A 50kW wood pellet-fired boiler is proving considerably cheaper than electricity for heating the Bay of Plenty‘s 30 bed Titoki Healing Centre.

Fully automated and fed by a 3-tonne hopper topped up by the truckload, the system operates virtually hands-free.

Installation cost around $80,000. That compared more than favourably to the other main option, heat pumps, at around $90,000. Running costs are even more competitive at about $4,400 annually, almost a third of the costs estimated for running heat pumps.

Virtually every industrial process generates waste heat - the challenge is to recover this heat and make use of it economically. Waste heat can be seen in shimmering boiler flues or steaming waste water discharges.

Heat recovery captures waste heat and uses it to eliminate or reduce energy required in other areas of a process or site. This practice reduces a business's overall energy bill and greenhouse gas emissions as well as improving profitability.

This case study features a solar water heating installation at Solscape, an eco retreat near Raglan. Hot water is what tourists expect from the moment they unpack their suitcase and Solscape are using the sun's rays to solve this.