The Net-Zero Club: The Green Hotels Rejecting Fossil Fuels
Skift Take
Hotels that cut fossil fuels can lower operating costs and risk and even improve guest comfort, but the industry still treats decarbonization as optional, too expensive, confusing, and hard to compare or find.
On the edge of Exeter, where the highway meets the Devonshire countryside in southwest England, a science park is home to a growing community of technology, engineering, and health care companies, and one of the world’s most advanced climate and weather forecasting supercomputers. There is even talk of an astronaut training center one day.
Given the ambition, it is no surprise that the science park is also home to one of the boldest experiments in hospitality: the Voco Zeal Exeter hotel, which opened last year and was built to operate almost entirely without fossil fuels.
Built into the hotel’s cladding are vertical solar panels, the first of their kind installed in a UK building. The roof is covered in them too, and combined, they produce roughly half the 142-room hotel's total annual electricity.
In the hotel lobby, an areca palm tree reaches toward the ceiling. Beside it, a screen pulses with real-time measurements of the solar energy streaming
