Storio Elmina: Digital Power Meters for an Automated Warehouse

About Storio

A conventional warehouse spends most of its electricity on lighting and air movement. Storio's does not, and that changes the entire energy problem.

Storio Sdn Bhd is the operator and master tenant of the Exio Logistics Hub at Elmina East, in the City of Elmina, Selangor. Publicly announced figures put it at two facilities, Storio Hub 1 and Hub 2, across 22 acres and roughly 500,000 square feet, built to hold 117,000 pallet positions and move 240 pallets an hour. The operating model combines AI and robotics to run automated storage and retrieval: stacker cranes, automated guided vehicles, conveyor lines, roller lifts and palletisers, working tall racking at throughput a manual operation cannot reach.

The development is targeting GBI NRNC Silver and LEED v4 Gold, carries an 815 kWp solar photovoltaic system, and is stated to aim for a 24% reduction in energy consumption against a conventional warehouse. Each of those is a measurement problem before it is an engineering one. A 24% reduction is not a design feature, it is a claim, and a claim needs instruments behind it.

Automate a warehouse and you invert its load profile. Lighting falls away, because robots do not need to see. What replaces it is motor load, and motor load behaves nothing like lighting. It is spiky, it is coordinated, and it tracks throughput rather than opening hours.

The challenge: in an automated warehouse, demand is the bill

Storio's team went straight to maximum demand, and they were right to.

Under TNB's RP4 tariff structure, effective 1 July 2025, demand is billed through Capacity and Network charges, currently RM89.27 and RM97.06 per kW for the relevant medium-voltage categories, and is set by the single highest half-hour peak in the month. Consumption is what you use. Demand is how hard you pulled at your worst moment, and you pay for that moment for thirty days.

An automated facility is unusually good at manufacturing that moment. Stacker cranes accelerating loaded, conveyor lines starting together, AGVs charging while the system runs at rate: a peak-throughput half hour can sit far above the average, and nothing about it is visible on a monthly invoice. Two facilities moving identical annual volumes can pay very different demand charges depending entirely on whether their movements are spread or stacked.

That is a schedulable problem, which is what makes it worth measuring. But only if the peak can be attributed to something. A single incoming meter tells you the peak happened. It does not tell you which subsystem caused it, or whether the same combination is about to repeat tomorrow.

Rooftop solar complicates this rather than solving it. Maximum demand is assessed on what the site draws from the grid, so an 815 kWp array only trims the peak when generation happens to coincide with it. A throughput peak at two in the afternoon gets real help. The same peak at nine in the evening gets none, and a facility running to a fulfilment schedule rather than a solar one can easily set its monthly maximum after dark. Knowing which of those you have requires interval data on both sides of the meter.

The second driver is certification. The facility is pursuing GBI (Green Building Index), Malaysia's home-grown green building rating tool, which assesses buildings across six criteria including Energy Efficiency. GBI's sub-metering criterion exists so that consumption can actually be monitored, on the reasoning that a building cannot be operated efficiently if nobody can see how it is performing. Certification wants evidence, and evidence means instrumentation. The same instruments that satisfy the assessor are the ones that will later show whether the 24% target was met.

What Cobler installed

Cobler is delivering the work with Cape Renewables Sdn Bhd, in two parts: the EMS panel and Modbus gateway that form the data backbone, and the termination of the digital power meters (DPMs) that feed it.

The metering design follows the way the building actually spends money rather than the way its single line diagram is drawn:

- The incomer first, to establish a verifiable total that reconciles against the TNB bill.
- Then the loads that set the peak, so a demand event can be attributed to a subsystem and a moment in the throughput schedule rather than to the site as a whole.
- CT ratios sized against measured running current, not against breaker rating. This matters more in an automated facility than a conventional one, because motor loads swing hard between idle and rate. A CT chosen off the breaker frame will read the busy half hour adequately and the rest of the day as noise.
- Modbus RTU over RS-485 into the EMS panel gateway, feeding CobiNeural as the energy management system above the meters.

Implementation is scheduled for completion in October 2026.

Delivering into a live construction programme

Metering sits near the end of a long chain on a project like this. The EMS panel, the gateway and the DPM terminations all depend on switchgear being energised, boards being final, and the automation contractors being far enough along that what you are measuring is what will actually run.

That makes schedule, not engineering, the thing to manage. Work windows compress, and the practical answer is to keep the parts that can proceed independently moving: panel and gateway installation staged ahead of termination, points confirmed against the final board schedule rather than the tender drawings, and the documentation package prepared alongside the physical work instead of after it.

The general lesson for anyone specifying an EMS inside a construction programme: fix the metering schedule and the document chain at kickoff, when the board schedule is still being finalised and adding a point costs a drawing revision rather than a site visit.

What it gives Storio

- Insights → Energy tracks consumption, power factor, energy use intensity and the Max Demand KPI at site and equipment level, at interval resolution, so a peak is attributable to a subsystem and a moment rather than to a month.
- Alerts sends anomalies by WhatsApp or email, which is how equipment running against an idle system surfaces the same day.
- Reporting produces the documented, repeatable output that GBI evidence and any later EECA or ISO 50001 work depend on, from a record that is auditable by construction.
- Where the data shows a repeatable, schedule-driven peak, Actions and automation can stagger it in software instead of relying on someone holding the sequence in their head.

Where the project stands

The installation is ongoing, with implementation scheduled for completion in October 2026.

On completion, Storio will be able to see demand as it forms rather than after it is priced, attribute it to the subsystem and the moment that caused it, and hold the evidence base its GBI NRNC Silver submission expects, with the instrumentation in place to test the facility's own 24% energy reduction target rather than assert it. In a facility where throughput drives the peak and the peak drives the bill, that is the difference between paying for a half hour and managing it.

See how other warehouse operators approach this, or talk to us about metering your facility.