Commercial energy for retail & shopping centers

Retail electricity spend divides cleanly between tenants and landlords, and the two have different problems. A tenant pays for its own meter and usually signed whatever contract was available at fit-out. A landlord pays for common-area load — parking lot lighting, corridors, signage, sometimes shared HVAC — and passes it through as CAM charges that tenants scrutinise every year.

For landlords, that scrutiny is the argument for shopping the common-area meter properly. CAM is one of the few operating expenses a landlord can lower without cutting service, and a demonstrable reduction is a tangible thing to show tenants at renewal. For tenants, the argument is simpler: your own meter is yours to shop, whatever the lease says about common areas.

Both sides benefit from getting end dates aligned. A centre with meters expiring in six different months has six chances a year to roll onto a holdover rate, and the property manager is rarely tracking all of them.

How retail draw power

Daytime and evening-weighted across a long trading day, with lighting and HVAC as the dominant loads and comparatively little overnight draw beyond security lighting and refrigerated display.

What drives the bill

• Sales-floor and display lighting across long trading hours
• HVAC load driven by door-open traffic and glass frontage
• Common-area meters at centres — parking, corridors, signage
• Seasonal trading peaks around holidays

The term that catches this vertical out

Common-area accounts. At multi-tenant centres, the CAM meter is often the only one the landlord controls, is frequently the largest single account on the property, and is routinely the one nobody has shopped.

The Houston angle

Houston’s strip-centre stock is enormous and largely older, with parking-lot lighting and rooftop HVAC that were specified decades ago. The supply contract is the part of that bill that can change this month rather than at the next capital cycle.

What we look at before shopping anything

The order matters. We read your existing position first, because roughly one account in five turns out to be on a contract worth keeping, and finding that out costs you nothing but tells you something worth knowing.

• Your current rate and rate type — fixed, variable, indexed, or a holdover rate you rolled onto when a contract expired.
• Your contract end date — the single fact that determines how soon anything can change and how much leverage you have.
• Early termination exposure — whether leaving early costs a fixed fee, a market-based calculation, or nothing at all.
• Your load shape — the pattern described above, taken from interval data rather than assumed from your business type.
• The split between supply and delivery — so you know what proportion of the bill is genuinely in play before anyone talks about savings.