Resort has bright ideas for carpark
A LARGE solar panel carpark could become part of Townsville’s landscape in the future.
It’s something The Ville ResortCasino is looking into as part of a large- scale energy audit to finding more efficiencies at the building.
The resort has engaged nu- tility to examine its energy use.
Managing director and co- founder Daniel Barber said they were working with Hayley Morris on exciting ideas for the resort- casino.
Ms Morris is executive director of the Morris Group, which owns the development.
“We’ve been speaking with Hayley about the project viability about building a very large solar car park,” Mr Barber said.
If a solar carpark did go ahead and all nu- tility’s recommendations are implemented, Mr Barber said they were projecting to remove more than 50 per cent of the site’s energy use from the grid.
“It’s about using less energy and paying less, we can lower energy bills and increase efficiency,” he said.
Mr Barber said The Ville ResortCasino had a focus on sustainability.
The Ville Resort chief executive officer Michael Jones said the energy audit was important for the resort to understand the limitations the building had in energy efficiencies and what could be done to improve this.
“We’ll spend some time delving into the results and putting a plan in place to address some of the issues,” he said.
“This work is extremely important to us as an organisation because we rely heavily on our surrounding environment to drive visitation to our property. We see a direct correlation between our stewardship of the physical building and its energy efficiency and the flow- on effect to the natural environment.”
Mr Jones said protecting those assets through better efficiency made sense as a business but was an integral part of the North Queensland tourism sector. In terms of solar installation and other innovations, Mr Jones said they would be guided by the recommendations of the energy audit.
Mr Barber said nu- tility spent a lot of time with management developing a masterplan for energy use.
Besides monitoring energy use and coming up with solutions, Mr Barber said there were plans to install an energy management system.
“The standard system doesn’t measure the savings that we help with,” he said.