Benidorm hotel to run on olive stones

THE Poseidon Playa Hotel in Benidorm has become the first in the Valencia region have a production facility for biomass energy.

That is the production of energy through the burning of organic fuels other than oil and gas.

Last weekend the hotel presented the fruits of its €230,000 investment with a demonstration of how the newly installed specialist boilers cope with the burning of stones from olives.

The investment can be recovered with 3 to 4 years, according to reports.

The system places Benidorm at the head of renewable energy in the tourism sector, as a similar apparatus was previously installed in the Arena Blanca camping site.

For the hotel, located in the Poniente beach, it is projected it will be a saving of €100,000 per year on its convential fuel bills. The hotel had already partially converted away from conventional energy by installing solar panels in 2009.

Now two specialist boilers heat water in a process similar to that when using diesel, but in this case, with a much simpler fuel: chopped dried olive stones, and other materials of vegetable origin.

Among the advantages of such fuels are their high calorific value (which enables high performance machinery), the price (free of oil price increases, as supplier and hotel have a fixed setting for the next decade), and their respect for the Environment (100% reduced CO2 emissions by a special filtering and extraction system).

One problem to overcome was the need for space to accommodate 25,000 kilos of olive stones.

The hotel used the space previously used to store diesel.

Not all hotels have such a facility, as they have their fuels delivered as and when needed.

By Paul Deed