Great Eastern Mall & Office: Sub-Metering and Centralised Energy Reporting

Great Eastern Mall & Office in Kuala Lumpur now reads its energy from one platform. Sub-meters across the building feed CobiNeural, which gives the operations team live dashboards, scheduled reports and real-time maximum demand monitoring. Reporting that used to take days now takes minutes.

The site

Great Eastern Mall & Office is a mixed-use building in Kuala Lumpur, with retail floors for many tenants below occupied office floors. The two parts use energy differently. Mall floors change with trading hours, shopper numbers and tenant fit-outs. Office floors follow a steadier weekday pattern. Shared services such as chillers, lifts, car park ventilation and lighting serve both, and their cost is charged to whoever the lease makes responsible.

With this mix, a single utility meter cannot help the team manage cost. Consumption is spread across dozens of areas and systems, and one total on the Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) invoice cannot show which part of the building is driving it.

The problem

Energy data was scattered and only available after the fact. Readings were kept in separate places, with no combined view of the mall and office. Producing a report meant collecting numbers by hand from several sources, so the month was over before anyone saw it.

Maximum demand made this harder. Maximum demand is a major part of a commercial electricity bill. It is charged on the highest power draw recorded in the billing period, and the team could not see it until the invoice arrived. One combined peak can set the demand charge for the whole month, for example chillers ramping up while the car park fans and a tenant's equipment start at the same time. Without live data, the team had no way to know a peak was forming.

As a multi-tenant property, the building also needs fair, defensible cost allocation. Without measuring who uses what, every discussion about recoverable charges starts from estimates.

What we did

We sub-metered the property and brought every metering point into CobiNeural. The platform runs as an overlay on the building's existing metering, so nothing had to be removed and replaced. The data follows the layout of the building: locations (mall, office and shared services), then equipment, then individual sensors. The team can read consumption at whatever level a question needs.

Four modules cover the building's gaps:

• Insights -> Energy shows consumption, power factor, energy use intensity (EUI) and the Max Demand KPI (key performance indicator) by location and by equipment. Demand is no longer a number that appears once a month. The team sees peaks as they build.
• Reporting turns the combined data into scheduled energy reports, which used to be assembled by hand. The same reports can cover anomaly and energy-saving-measure reporting aligned with the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Act (EECA) when the property needs it.
• Dashboards put the whole property on one live view, so the mall, the office and the shared services are read side by side rather than in separate spreadsheets.
• Billing & Tariffs handles tenant cost allocation, so recoverable charges are backed by measured sub-metered consumption instead of estimates.

Because demand is visible as it builds, the team can respond before a peak sets the month's charge. If the property later wants chiller-plant control, that would be an automation project using the same data.

What changed

• The whole property runs from one source of energy data.
• Reporting that used to take days now takes minutes.
• Maximum demand is a figure the operations team watches during the month, not a line item found on the invoice.
• Every floor, system and tenant area is measured, which supports both cost control and fair allocation.

This also prepares the building to run in line with ISO 50001, the energy management standard: measure first, report reliably, then improve.

Planning the same for your building?

If your property's energy data sits in separate meters and last month's invoices, the first step is to bring it into one place. See how other facilities did it, or talk to us about combining your building's energy data and keeping watch on maximum demand.