Energy monitoring and rebilling

On energy monitoring and rebilling

Whether you’re the owner of a building or the company in charge of its maintenance, you’ll know that energy management is key to optimizing performance and reducing costs by up to 30%.

If the building or industrial unit is shared and can be rented out to different businesses, monitoring energy consumption costs becomes an essential factor.

Situación inicial

This case study presents and analyzes the project carried out by our partner BaitiKW to monitor and rebill energy consumption across 580 units—offices, shops, and premises—located in the Al Tijaria, Al Shorouq, Al Bodour and Symphony Style towers; all in Kuwait City.

The project required an energy management solution to allocate electricity consumption costs to the various rented units and offices within the Al Tijaria, Al Shorouq, Al Bodour and Symphony Style towers and their associated shopping centres.

Also, given the impressive scale of the towers, all monitoring had to be carried out wirelessly. Below is a summary of the requirements and objectives:

• Energy monitoring of the 580 locales, offices and spaces distributed across the four buildings
• Wireless communication between the datalogger gateways and the energy meters
• Monetization of consumption based on the electricity tariff applied in Kuwait
• Automatic generation and delivery of simulated electricity bill reports to the tenants of the offices, shops, and units
• Cloud-based management of the project’s maintenance, including energy contracts, metering devices, and mobile communications

Solution applied

For this project, BaitiKW and Circutor proposed the use of Modbus energy meters and Modbus-to-LoRa converters to create a wireless monitoring network.  Each Modbus/LoRa converter can be configured as either a Master (connected to the Modbus Master) or a Satellite (connected to the Modbus slave), allowing the deployment of the LoRa network using a single device model.

Bridge LR in Master mode are connected to ePick (formerly the SBOX series), which handles data collection, storage, and transmission to the DataBox platform, which manages the data and generates the reports.

In short, the number of devices used in the project were as follows:

The key to the project lay in the Bridge LR device, which enabled the 580 meters to be converted into wireless devices.

Thanks to the use of LoRa communications, installation and cabling costs were reduced by 80%, making it possible to monitor all 580 spaces using just 16 private LoRa wireless subnets.

Depending on the subnet, between 15 and 100 energy meters are monitored hourly. And it's all done without running a single communication cable.

Below is the device diagram for each of the gateways installed for the Al-Tijaria project:

Once the energy consumption data is sent to the platform, it is processed and monetized based on the costs specified in each client’s electricity contract.

Finally, each client’s logo is added, and the reports are sent automatically, delivering a fully personalized and comprehensive service.