Managing shopping centre tenancy energy billing with IoT

Managing excessive energy use outside rental arrangements across multiple tenancies is one of the many challenges faced by facility managers of large shopping centres.

For one of Queensland’s busiest large format shopping centres with multiple tenancies, excessive electricity usage meant utility bills were becoming increasingly expensive and were no longer covered under rent specified in the lease.

The Facility Manager required a smart monitoring solution that could apportion billing of electrical consumption due to growing electricity usage each quarter.

Precise Air’s Building Performance Optimisation (BPO) team were engaged to analyse and implement a solution that would provide the FM team with real data that could be used to justify accurate energy cost apportioning across tenancies. As this is a retrofit project, the client required a solution that could pull data from the existing solution to avoid replacing the entire system

Accurate and up-to-date data is vital for individualised billing

Our client’s existing reporting tool had a number of problems common to older standalone systems:

• Poor utility usage insights: The Centre’s standard EMS (energy management system) didn’t offer the granular data in the format required to be able to accurately charge each tenancy. It was unable to apportion and visually present electrical data.
• Existing locally hosted solution: The existing reporting tool was expensive to maintain and was hosted locally on unreliable servers.
• No remote visualisation: The client required a solution that is accessible remotely from the cloud to support billing procedures

A solution that simplifies energy cost apportioning

The BPO team analysed the client’s current reporting system against their energy management and reporting requirements.

Based on experience gained in similar scenarios, the BPO team then selected and implemented a Nube iO cloud-hosted reporting tool which enabled sub-tenancy utility monitoring and billing.

The system generates a monthly report showing total energy consumption per tenancy.

Improved insights and proof of cost

The benefits of BPO’s solution include:

• remote visualisation of facility electricity usage with live data
• improved insights into individual electricity usage
• monthly reports generated displaying historical data
• customised dashboard with client’s branding and personalised layout
• Peak, Off Peak and Shoulder time period reporting
• multiple user logins and levels of access.

Importantly for this client, the system can be upgraded to add more tenants, add other services including water meters, and control HVAC systems.

Our client can also quickly and easily add other shopping centres within their portfolio, allowing them to visualise all centres across their portfolio on one dashboard.

Return on investment – less than one year

Not only was the existing system not fit for purpose, it was considerably more expensive with an annual subscription fee of $2,500pa.

By comparison, BPO’s implementation costs ran to $2.8k with just a $300 p.a. subscription fee, providing a return on investment of under one year and annual ongoing costs of just $300.