How EXEED Helped One Irish Hotel Save €88,776 a Year in Energy Costs
Mullingar Park Hotel already thought it had found most of its savings. EXEED found the rest.
A Hotel Running on Energy It Wasn't Watching
High Level Wins:
665,905 kWh saved every year
€88,776 in annual cost savings, a 10.8% reduction
138 tonnes of CO2 cut annually
Energy use per guest dropped from 155.85 kWh to 140 kWh
SEAI EXEED Designed certification achieved, independently verified by NSAI
Overall energy savings of 33.9% across the hotel's full efficiency journey
The Story Behind the Numbers
Mullingar Park Hotel is a family-owned, four-star destination hotel in Ireland's midlands. Premium rooms, conference and banqueting space, a full spa and leisure facility with a pool, sauna, steam room and gym. It's the kind of operation that runs on energy every hour of every day, and for a long time, nobody was really watching how much.
That changed during COVID. Occupancy dropped, but energy use didn't drop with it. That mismatch was the first real signal that something in the building wasn't behaving the way it should. It led the hotel to install proper sub-metering and monitoring, giving them, for the first time, a clear picture of where their energy was actually going. But this was only the start to the their energy efficiency journey
How EXEED Works
The hotel turned to EXEED, SEAI's Excellence in Energy Efficient Design programme. Where most upgrades ask "what can we replace," EXEED asks something bigger: how does this entire building actually perform as one connected system. Following the IS 399 methodology, the process looked at ventilation, air conditioning, lighting and controls not as separate jobs but as one strategy.
That shift in approach is what unlocked the next 10.5% in savings, the piece that had been sitting just out of reach.
Under the EXEED process, the hotel and Watt Footprint targeted the areas where the harder savings were hiding. Air conditioning across the function rooms was upgraded, with chiller energy savers and variable speed drives added to the air handling units. The swimming pool ductwork was insulated. Lighting and ventilation in the conference and function spaces moved to CO2 demand-led controls, adjusting automatically based on actual occupancy instead of running flat out regardless. Underneath all of it sat an upgraded building management system, giving the hotel real-time visibility, fault detection and performance tracking they'd never had before, and built to scale so future upgrades could plug straight in. Every measure was verified independently, not just estimated.
The Payoff
Timmy McCarthy, who led the project for Watt Footprint, put it simply. With most of the obvious opportunities already addressed, the EXEED IS 399 process gave the structure needed to uncover what remained, adding another 10.5% on top of savings already achieved. Combined with the hotel's earlier work, total energy savings now sit at 33.9%. And the hotel isn't finished. It's already looking at pairing its now much lower energy demand with on-site renewable generation.
Paul Mahon, CEO of Watt Footprint, called it a standout result, the kind that speaks for itself once you see the numbers.
Josephine Hughes, Owner of Mullingar Park Hotel, summed it up from the other side of the table. A structured, design-led approach to energy efficiency delivered measurable savings and better performance across the entire facility. A win for the business, the guests, and the environment.
If This Sounds Familiar
Maybe you've already done an energy audit. Maybe you've swapped a few systems, made the obvious changes, ticked the easy boxes. And maybe you still have a feeling there's more sitting on the table, just harder to see.
That's exactly the stage EXEED is built for. It's not a starting point. It's what comes after the starting point, when the real savings start hiding in how your building works as a whole rather than in any single upgrade.
We'll walk you through what an EXEED programme could look like for your business, no obligation, no jargon, just a clear next step.
Data centres now eat up nearly a quarter of Ireland's electricity, and that pressure feeds straight into your bill. Here's what's driving it, and how restaurants and hotels can get ahead of it.