Client
Las Arenas Shopping Center, Merlin Properties
Scope
Homogenization of energy meter readings across 100 shops and installation of energy monitoring.
Las Arenas Shopping Center in Barcelona is more than just an iconic landmark. It’s a bustling hub with over 100 shops, 10 million visitors annually, and more than 106,000 square meters of retail space. But managing energy consumption across such a vast and complex facility posed a serious operational challenge.
MERLIN Properties, the real estate giant behind Las Arenas, needed a smarter way to monitor utilities, reduce inefficiencies and streamline operations. The solution came from Spacewell Energy and JustaEnergia. Here’s how, together, they transformed energy performance with a tech-driven approach to energy monitoring in retail.
The Challenge: Manual Energy Readings and Inconsistent Data
Each shop within the shopping center operates under its own brand policies, values, and sustainability priorities. This created a complex energy management challenge: collecting and processing consumption data from more than 100 individual locations.
Water metering was particularly problematic. Faulty connections meant readings could not be captured automatically, forcing teams to collect data manually each month, meter by meter.
Across the site, the facility management team was responsible for monitoring over 100 utility meters, covering shops, water systems, HVAC, and shared services. This process required visiting each location every month, leading to:
- Significant time investment
- Increased risk of human error
- Limited visibility, making real-time performance tracking impossible
As a result, MERLIN Properties needed a scalable solution that could centralize energy data, enable remote monitoring, and automate the collection process to support faster, more informed decision-making. And Spacewell Energy was the chosen energy management software for this.
The Solution: Automated Energy Monitoring in Retail
To start gathering data accurately, JustaEnergia upgraded the metering infrastructure across the shopping centre by installing over 200 smart meters, including:
- 180 water meters
- 31 thermal meters
- 30 electrical analyzers
- 1 gas meter
All equipment was connected via Ethernet and integrated into Spacewell Energy using standard protocols like MBus and ModBus for real-time data capture.
Once these were installed and correctly connected to send data to Spacewell Energy, the facility team gained real-time visibility of energy usage, remote access via VPN for immediate issue resolution, automated anomaly detection and seamless simulation of monthly energy billing.
Key Results: From Manual Labor to Intelligent Energy Automation
The shift to Spacewell Energy delivered immediate and long-term value for Las Arenas: helping the facilities team to monitor real-time energy data and save time in manual readings, reducing errors in reporting. With the energy dashboards and reports, the management of all locations from a single source has helped the standardization of reporting across tenants and the identification of deviations early to find solutions.
Spacewell Energy also supported compliance with ISO 50001 and ISO 14001 standards, accelerating certification timelines thanks to accurate documentation of the processes and standardized data.
This case highlights how shopping centers, and retail real estate as a whole, can use energy intelligence to modernize operations, lower costs, and improve performance at scale.
Do you want to know if Spacewell Energy is the right tool for you in retail? Request a demo below and let our team show you all about its capabilities.
