A Penang shopping mall and office tower won two Malaysian national energy awards and a regional ASEAN Energy Award in October 2026 for a chiller retrofit that cost its owner nothing upfront. The retrofit’s entire commercial logic — who gets paid, and how much — depends on a single savings percentage that the award body and the contractor currently report two different ways.

What Did Susten Actually Win, and For What?

Susten Sdn Bhd, a Kuala Lumpur-based energy performance contracting firm, retrofitted the central chiller plant serving Gurney Paragon Mall and the adjoining Hunza Tower office block in George Town, Penang — a mixed-use complex owned by developer Hunza Properties Berhad. The project placed 1st Runner-Up in the Retrofitted Building category of the ASEAN Energy Awards 2026, part of the Green Building Awards presented in Manila alongside the 44th ASEAN Ministers on Energy Meeting, according to the official winners list and reporting carried by Vietnam News and The Edge Malaysia’s regional wire on October 8, 2026. Malaysia secured 20 regional recognitions in total this year, Malaysia’s Ministry of Energy Transition and Water Transformation (PETRA) said in the same coverage — up from 16 in 2025.

The ASEAN award followed a win at Malaysia’s own National Energy Awards (NEA) earlier in 2026, the domestic qualifying round that PETRA uses to select entries for the regional contest. A LinkedIn post by a Sunway Construction Group executive, published around the same time, says the project collected two separate NEA honours: one for the retrofitted building itself, and a special award specifically for Energy Performance Contracting — the financing structure, not just the hardware.

The Two Numbers Nobody Has Reconciled: 45% and “44–50%”

The National Energy Awards case file for the project states that the retrofit — high-efficiency chillers paired with variable-speed-drive pumps — cut the plant’s energy consumption by 45% and its maximum demand charges by 31%, according to the case page published on the National Energy Awards website. That is the only figure attached to an award body’s own case record.

The LinkedIn post describing the project’s performance in the first half of 2026 gives a different number: the chiller plant running “44–50% below its pre-retrofit baseline.” Both figures describe the same plant and the same retrofit, but they are not the same number, and neither source publishes the metered data — pre-retrofit baseline consumption, post-retrofit consumption by month, or how “baseline” was defined — that would let an outside party reconcile them. One is an awards-body summary; the other is a company-linked social media post. Neither is an audited engineering report, and this blog found no independently verified measurement data for the project.

What Hides Inside an Energy Performance Contract

The reason the exact percentage matters more here than in an ordinary retrofit is the financing structure underneath it. Under Susten’s own description of its model, published on its company FAQ, the contractor designs, funds and installs the retrofit at zero capital cost to the building owner, and is repaid from a contracted share of the energy savings the retrofit produces — a structure known as an Energy Performance Contract (EPC). Susten says the building is cash-positive from the first month, meaning the owner’s share of the savings is designed to exceed what it previously paid before any contractor repayment.

That arrangement only works as advertised if the savings percentage used to split the bill is accurate. In a conventional capex retrofit — where the owner borrows or self-funds the equipment, as with OUE REIT’s $43 million district-cooling conversion in Singapore, examined in this blog on October 4 — a measurement error mostly affects how fast the owner recoups its own spending. In an EPC, the measured savings percentage is the input to a live revenue split between two parties with opposing incentives to round it in their own favour. A five-point gap between 45% and 50% is not a rounding error at that scale; on a shopping mall and office tower chiller plant, it is the difference of tens of thousands of ringgit a year in who keeps what share of the bill.

Why This Matters Beyond One Mall in Penang

Malaysia’s own performance-contracting trade listing, SME100, separately profiles Susten as a firm whose projects “consistently achieve over 40% reduction in energy use” — a round number that sits inside the gap between the two figures reported for this specific project, without resolving which is closer to the metered truth. Malaysia is actively building policy support for performance contracting as a zero-capex retrofit route; Putrajaya proposed tax incentives tied to green building certification on September 3, a move this blog covered the same week. A financing model that scales on contractor-reported savings needs a disclosure standard independent of both the contractor and the awards marketing promoting it, or the next contested number will not be an award submission — it will be an invoice.

What a Building Owner Should Ask Before Signing an EPC

Two questions follow directly. Does the contract define “savings” against an independently metered baseline, or the contractor’s own dashboard? And does it specify a third-party measurement and verification protocol — the kind recommended by international EPC frameworks such as the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol — before a dispute, not after one? An award recognizes that the equipment works. It does not resolve how the money gets split, and in an EPC, that split is the entire deal.

Key takeaways

  • Susten’s Energy Performance Contract retrofit of Gurney Paragon Mall and Hunza Tower in Penang won 1st Runner-Up in the Retrofitted Building category at the ASEAN Energy Awards 2026, announced October 7–8, 2026.
  • The National Energy Awards case record states a 45% cut in energy consumption and a 31% cut in maximum demand charges; a separate company-linked account states 44–50%, and neither source has published the underlying metered data.
  • Under Susten’s zero-capex Energy Performance Contract model, the building owner pays no upfront capital cost and the contractor is repaid from a share of the measured savings — making the accuracy of the savings percentage, not just the equipment, the commercial core of the deal.
  • Malaysia is actively building policy support for performance contracting as a retrofit financing route, which raises the stakes for an independent, contractor-blind measurement and verification standard rather than award-season figures.
  • Building owners and portfolio managers considering an EPC should contractually require independent metering and a defined measurement and verification protocol before signing, rather than relying on the contractor’s or the award body’s reported percentage.