How a Bayan Lepas OSAT facility used Huawei SUN2000 + LUNA2000 to slash Maximum Demand charges and document RE100 Scope 2 progress
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“The LUNA2000 peak-shaving component alone cut our Maximum Demand registration by 180 kW in the first month. Our parent company's sustainability team in Singapore now uses our Penang site as the benchmark for Asian factories on the RE100 roadmap. Trexon understood our 24/7 clean-room constraints from day one — no disruption to production during the entire eight-week installation.”
Penang's Bayan Lepas Free Industrial Zone is home to some of the world's most energy-intensive manufacturing operations. Outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) facilities run wire-bonding, wafer-dicing, and IC packaging equipment around the clock in ISO Class 7 clean rooms where temperature and humidity must remain within tight tolerances. A typical Tier-1 OSAT plant in the FIZ consumes 3–5 million kWh per month, with TNB Maximum Demand charges frequently exceeding RM 80,000 per month on top of energy consumption costs.
For this particular facility — a Tier-1 OSAT serving major fabless chipmakers in the US and Taiwan — the energy bill was a secondary pressure. The primary driver was Scope 2 emissions reporting. The parent company had signed the RE100 commitment in 2023, pledging to source 100% renewable electricity across all manufacturing sites by 2035. The Penang facility, as the largest site in Southeast Asia, was expected to lead by example. Without a credible Scope 2 reduction programme, the facility's annual sustainability disclosure to the parent's US-listed parent would show zero renewable progress — a reputational and investor-relations problem.
Trexon's engineering team spent two weeks mapping the facility's load profile before proposing a system architecture. Key findings:
The load profile showed a strong overlap between solar generation hours (09:00–16:00) and peak demand windows. A correctly sized PV system could both reduce energy consumption charges and, with battery storage, actively shave the MD registration peak.
After modelling six design variants, Trexon recommended a two-component system:
Component 1 — 2.5 MWp Rooftop PV Array: 4,000 units of Trina Solar Vertex 625W panels mounted on aluminium ballasted racking (no roof penetrations, preserving waterproofing warranty) on all three production block rooftops. Twelve Huawei SUN2000-215KTL-H3 string inverters (215 kW each) handle DC-AC conversion. The SUN2000-215KTL-H3 was chosen for its grid-forming capability, reactive power support (±0.95 power factor), and native anti-islanding protection certified to IEEE 1547-2018 — a requirement the facility's electrical consultant specified for clean-room grid stability.
Component 2 — 1 MWh LUNA2000 ESS for Maximum Demand Shaving: Five LUNA2000-215 battery units (200 kWh each) installed in a dedicated battery room on the ground floor, integrated with the Huawei SmartPower Controller. The ESS operates on a charge-during-solar-peak, discharge-at-MD-registration-window cycle programmed to cap the facility's visible demand at 3,200 kW — a 200–350 kW reduction from historical peak levels.
The Huawei FusionSolar platform provides unified monitoring for both PV and ESS, with real-time generation, state-of-charge, and MD-shaving performance visible on a single dashboard accessible by the parent company's sustainability team in Singapore.
The installation was completed over eight weeks (October–December 2025) using a night-and-weekend work schedule approved by the facility's production planning team. Key constraints managed:
The facility's Facilities Director confirmed that there were zero production incidents attributable to the solar installation — a outcome Trexon attributes to the 40-page Installation Method Statement prepared and approved by the client's EHS team before work began.
Financial results (February–April 2026, three full months):
The LUNA2000 ESS reduced Monthly Maximum Demand registration from an average of 3,480 kW to 3,300 kW in the first month and 3,285 kW by the third month — a reduction of 195 kW, translating to RM 5,909 per month in MD charge savings alone.
Combined with energy consumption savings from the 2.5 MWp PV array (average 2,650 MWh/month generated against a consumption of 3,900 MWh/month), total monthly bill reduction averaged RM 100,000 — a 29% reduction. Projected annual savings: RM 1,200,000.
At the installed system cost, simple payback is 5.1 years. The facility's CFO noted that the payback is conservative: it does not account for escalating TNB tariffs under ATAP's annual review mechanism or the carbon price risk that the parent company is beginning to internalise in its capital allocation models.
Environmental results:
The system displaces approximately 5,200 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent per year, representing an 18% reduction in the facility's Scope 2 market-based emissions using Malaysia's 2024 grid emission factor. The parent company's 2026 Sustainability Report will cite this figure as the first verified renewable electricity milestone in the Asia Pacific manufacturing network.
RE100 progress:
The 18% renewable share, documented through FusionSolar generation reports and cross-referenced against TNB utility bills, qualifies as RE100-eligible Scope 2 reduction under the RE100 Technical Criteria (2023). The facility is on track to reach 35% renewable share by 2028 once a planned Phase 2 expansion (additional 1.5 MWp on the carpark canopy) is commissioned.
Two engineering decisions proved decisive. First, the choice of the SUN2000-215KTL-H3 with reactive power support — rather than a cheaper string inverter without this feature — allowed the facility's power quality consultant to sign off without requiring additional static VAr compensators, saving an estimated RM 180,000 in ancillary equipment. Second, sizing the ESS at 1 MWh rather than the initially proposed 500 kWh — a RM 420,000 incremental investment — doubled the MD-shaving window from 2 to 4 hours, capturing the critical 16:00–18:00 evening peak when the second production shift ramps up equipment.
Note: Financial figures represent indicative modelling based on Trexon installation data and TNB tariff schedules. Specific client details are anonymised per B2B confidentiality.
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