-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 6
Energy Usage
Energy Sparks uses gas and electricity usage data.
The data is obtained via smart meters installed in schools. These meters can be attached to both gas and electricity supplies.
A school may have multiple gas and electricity meters installed across its site. For example they may be serving different buildings.
Not all meters at a school may currently be active. But historical data might still be associated with them.
The meters collect half-hourly readings of energy usage, giving 48 readings per meter per day.
The meters generally transmit meter readings every 12 to 24 hours via GSM to a central database owned by a properties energy supplier.
Energy Sparks currently process this AMR data via a number of sources:
- Manual uploads - this is mostly done to help setup, e.g. to upload historical data, or additional data for an older meter
- Fetched via SFTP - this is only used in B&NES. The council provide a daily dump of readings, which is collected daily.
- Email - this is currently the most common approach, as energy providers are generally able to provide an emailed CSV report of usage to customers. Formats vary across providers
We currently process data supplied via email from:
- meter operators - IMServ, Energy Assets and Stark
- suppliers - EDF and RWE
IMServ, Energy Assets and EDF are by far the most common at the moment as EDF has the Crown Commercial electricity framework contract which lots of schools and local authorities use.
Corona has the Crown Commercial gas framework contract and uses Energy Assets as their meter operator.
IMServ and Energy Assets are also very popular with local authorities who have appointed them as their meter operators directly.
We are building a test interface to APIs that are underpinned by the services operated by the Data Communications Company (DCC).
This should make it easier for us to onboard new schools and provide more timely access to data. We may also be able to move to a more real-time approach for processing data in future.
Access will be via one of the API "resellers" that have direct access to the DCC APIs.