Equalbase: Portfolio-Wide Energy Monitoring Across Penang and Johor Warehouses

About Equalbase

Equalbase operates industrial and logistics warehouses across two Malaysian states: V1 and V2 in Penang, and ES103 Warehouse 1 and 2 in Iskandar, Johor. The space is leased to tenants including Shopee, so Equalbase is not just an energy consumer. It is a landlord that has to recover energy cost fairly from the businesses occupying its floor space.

Managing energy across a distributed portfolio, with tenants to bill, is a fundamentally different problem from running a single site. Each warehouse sits on its own TNB supply, draws its own maximum demand, and runs its own mix of lighting, ventilation, dock equipment, and tenant load. Four buildings in two states means four separate cost centres, four billing cycles, and no shared yardstick to compare one site against another.

The challenge

Each warehouse was metered in isolation. The estate had no portfolio-wide view, so an operations team in one state could not see how a building in the other was performing, or whether a spike at one site was normal or worth investigating.

Tenant billing was manual and slow. Recovering energy cost from occupants meant reading meters, reconciling figures by hand, and producing invoices after the fact. Manual allocation is error-prone, hard to defend when a tenant queries a charge, and a drag on the finance and facilities teams every cycle.

Peak demand at each site went unmanaged. Under TNB's maximum demand tariff, the single highest 30-minute demand interval in a month sets a charge that applies whether or not that peak repeats. Across four buildings, every unmanaged peak inflated cost on the whole estate, and nobody could see the peaks forming in time to act.

The solution

CobiNeural brings every warehouse into one portfolio. Rather than rip out existing meters, it deploys as an intelligent overlay, pulling sub-metered data from each site into a single platform so V1, V2, and both ES103 buildings are visible side by side.

The deployment maps to specific modules:

- Insights to Energy tracks consumption, power factor, and the Max Demand KPI at every site. Operators see maximum demand build through the billing period instead of discovering it on the TNB bill, which is what makes peak-demand shaving possible across each warehouse.
- Billing and Tariffs turns sub-metered readings into tenant cost allocation. Energy is billed from real consumption against the right tariff, so charges to tenants such as Shopee are accurate, repeatable, and defensible when questioned.
- Dashboards give Equalbase a cross-site portfolio view, so a manager can compare Penang and Johor on the same screen and spot the outlier without logging into four systems.
- Alerts push surge and anomaly notifications by WhatsApp or email, so an abnormal draw at any site reaches the right person while it is still actionable.

Where peak-demand shaving calls for control rather than just visibility, the same platform connects to site equipment through automation, layering on top of existing BMS, PLC, or SCADA rather than replacing it.

The result

Equalbase manages its whole portfolio from one platform. The team sees every warehouse in one place, bills tenants fairly from real consumption instead of manual meter reads, and keeps maximum demand in check across every site rather than reacting to it on the bill.

For a landlord recovering energy cost across multiple buildings and tenants, the shift is from four isolated meters to one operating picture: consistent data, accurate invoices, and demand managed before it becomes a charge. See how other operators run portfolio energy, or request a demo to see portfolio monitoring against your own sites.