From Building Services to Process Loads: Whole-Building Utility-Calibrated Simulation of Sustainable Operational Decarbonisation Limits in a UK SME Restaurant Retrofit

Restaurants combine long opening hours, catering demand, kitchen ventilation, DHW, and mixed-fuel cooking loads, making their decarbonisation different from generic commercial retrofit. For small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) hospitality premises, this makes the transition to net-zero operation a distinct sustainability challenge because a large, process-driven share of demand lies outside conventional building-fabric and building-services retrofit. This single-case study develops a whole-building utility-calibrated OpenStudio/EnergyPlus model for Beit El Zaytoun, a 655.82 m2 restaurant in Park Royal, London. Monthly electricity and gas data for June 2024–May 2025 were used to calibrate the baseline at whole-building level. Standalone and cumulative scenarios tested insulation, low-emissivity double glazing, LED lighting and controls, ASHP service scenarios, and an 11 kWp PV array. Baseline demand was 413,895 kWh/yr, equivalent to 631.1 kWh/m2·yr and 75,020 kgCO2e/yr. The lowest-net-energy analytical package reduced net imported energy to 314,734 kWh/yr and operational carbon to 56,700 kgCO2e/yr, a retained 24.0% reduction on the source reporting basis; this package is treated as an analytical bound rather than as a final design recommendation because it excludes cooling. The model-derived residual process load, kitchen and catering gas plus kitchen, and back-of-house electricity remained 233,920 kWh/yr across building-focused scenarios. The Residual-Load Index (RLI) rose from 0.57 to 0.74; with ±15% process-load allocation uncertainty, the optimised RLI range was 0.63–0.85, so the post-retrofit balance remained process-load dominated. The case demonstrates a practical decarbonisation ceiling likely to recur in similar high-process-load hospitality premises: fabric, lighting, heat electrification, and PV are necessary but insufficient without catering-equipment, cooking-fuel, kitchen-ventilation, refrigeration-control, sub-metering, and demand-response strategies. The paper contributes whole-building utility-calibrated quantitative evidence and a transferable RLI metric for sub-sector-specific sustainable retrofit policy, and the net-zero transition of SME food-service premises.