A metering point that costs nothing to install.
A virtual meter is a mathematical metering point: a calculated load derived from meters that already exist. It behaves like any other meter in MOL — it has readings, a profile, a tariff and a bill — but there is no instrument, no CT, no installation and nothing to fail.
Two demand peaks do not add up to one bigger peak.
This is where aggregating meters in a spreadsheet goes wrong. Two supply points each peaking at 400 kVA do not give a site peak of 800 kVA, because they almost never peak in the same half hour. Add the demand figures and you overstate the charge — sometimes substantially.
MOL aggregates by vector sum of active and reactive power, interval by interval. The correctly diversified maximum demand of the combined load then falls out of the totals directly, which is exactly what the utility does on a summated account.
- Common-area apportionment
- One virtual meter totals landlord load so it can be recovered from tenants pro rata, on a defensible basis rather than a floor-area guess.
- Measurement and verification
- An energy-saving intervention needs a before and after on the same boundary. A virtual meter defines that boundary without rewiring anything.
- Parent and child hierarchies
- Intake, sub-board, tenant. MOL models the tree and reconciles each level against the one above it.
- Unmetered and unmeterable points
- Where a physical meter is not feasible — or would cost more than the load it measures.
Who pays for the diesel?
Shopping centres are now built with enough local generation to run the whole mall, not just the lifts and the emergency lighting. Tenants expect to keep trading through an outage, and a centre that cannot offer that loses them.
Which creates an accounting problem. Generating from diesel costs several times what the utility charges, and that cost is incurred by whoever happened to be trading at the time. Recovering it from a flat service charge means the tenants who closed subsidise the ones who stayed open.
Conditional virtual meters
Split every tenant's consumption by what was generating it at the time.
01
One virtual meter records a tenant's consumption only in the intervals where the generator meter shows it was running.
02
A second records the same tenant in every interval where the generator was idle — the utility was supplying.
The two are then billed on different tariffs: one at the cost of utility supply, one at the real cost of generating. Each tenant pays for the diesel they actually consumed, in the half hours they actually consumed it.
It runs entirely in software, on the metering already installed. No duplicated reticulation, no separate emergency board per tenant, no control system. The alternative is a second set of meters and wiring on every tenant in the centre.
Want to see this on your own data?
We will run it against a month of your readings and show you what comes out.
Talk to us