Sharon Malone Marketing and Green Manager at Falls Hotel & Spa, Ennistymon with the SEAI Energy Awards for Innovative Deployment of Renewable Energy 2021. Photograph: Natasha Barton
GREEN energy “has to be the way forward” for the hospitality industry according to The Falls Hotel, Ennistymon which was certified as completely carbon neutral last year.
The Hotel, located by the River Inagh, runs almost entirely off its own hydroelectric turbine. That among a host of other initiatives including bio-LPG pool heating, a ban on single use plastics, and the addition of car charging stations to its car park has placed it at the forefront of environmental hospitality in Clare.
Sharon Malone Marketing and Green manager at the hotel told The Clare Echo that “absolutely, I think [green energy] has to be the way forward for every sector. I suppose we are very lucky with the river running alongside us but with a plan in place I do feel other businesses can do it. Green hospitality Ireland really helped us with our approach and I think it’s a model that can be adopted by most businesses. Starting off is the hardest thing to do but I really feel that every business needs to look at it. It definitely is the way forward”.
Sharon says achieving carbon neutrality was a long and difficult process but also a rewarding one, “it was a bit of a long road really. Back in 2016 the owners, the McCarthys, began looking for ways to make the hotel more sustainable. We were aware that even the building itself would have had a very large carbon footprint and that the impact on the environment around us was quite big. We realised our electricity bills were just huge, so we looked for ways to approach that first because that was the big one. Years ago, in the 60s, a man called John F. Wood owned the hotel and he had put a very small hydroelectric turbine on the river which provided some of the energy for the hotel. The remains of that were there so we looked at that as an option and started the construction of [our hydroelectric turbine] in 2016.”
The turbine took two years to construct going live near the end of 2018. Since then sustainability has become a guiding principle for the hotel and its carbon neutrality, certified by GreenMark.ie in March 2021, is now a point of pride. “It was [a proud moment when we were certified] because we weren’t sure we’d ever get there in some ways, but it all came together. It was almost hard to believe because the hotel was still operating, guests were still coming through, we were doing what we’d always done but we were doing it in a much more sustainable way” explained Sharon.
While they were forced to revert back to costly fossil fuels this summer on account of low water levels, their typical monthly energy bills are only between €4,000 to €5,000, reaching as low as €3,000 during periods of heavy rainfall. Sustainable energy projects like those The Falls Hotel have undertaken are becoming an attractive prospect in the hospitality sector where rising energy costs are posing a serious threat to the industry.
From Sharon’s perspective, it’s reassuring to know that energy costs are not something they have to be concerned about, “it’s one less thing to thing to worry about in a time where there is a lot to think about. During the summer we were getting a little bit panicky seeing those electricity bills coming in, but we do know in the next few months that it will be much more reduced. 5 years ago, you had no idea what was coming ahead with this crisis. It’s great that we are cushioned against it to a certain extent.”
