Automated meter reading data

Dear Liverpool City Council,

please could you provide me with the full set of data collected up
to May 2010 from the automated gas and electricity meter reading
equipment that Liverpool City Council has used for several years as
part of its energy management system.

Please could you also provide me with annual summary data about gas
and electricity use for each of the individual buildings monitored
by Liverpool City Council.

Background:

1. "Liverpool City Council (LCC) has a real-time energy management
system that allows it to identify increases or excessive power
usage throughout its properties." - see
http://www.ourcityourplanet.org.uk/

2. Newspaper article available here
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/environme...
including "It [Liverpool City Council] is the first authority in
Merseyside to be awarded the Carbon Trust Standard which recognises
the council's efforts to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of
the 500 buildings it's responsible for. Every school, library,
leisure centre, One Stop Shop and cemetery has been installed with
special equipment which monitors the amount of energy being used.
And, over the last three years, the council's energy team have been
using live updates, identifying those areas which use huge amounts
of gas or electricity - and coming up with solutions to reduce
this." Also "The city council were awarded with the prestigious
Carbon Trust Standard following an inspection from an independent
assessor who described the energy management as "excellent" and
said "there are few, if any, local authorities with such
exceptional quality of data that can monitor live, virtually an
entire estate"."

3. "The organisation [Liverpool City Council, LCC] has reliable
information which it uses to monitor its performance and manage
progress in achieving its objectives for reducing its impact on the
environment." and "To date automated meter reading equipment has
been installed across all the LCC estate, bringing the benefits of
real time data into the unit." in a document dated 16th April 2009
available here www.liverpool.gov.uk/Images/tcm21-165119...

Yours faithfully,

Rebecca Lawson

Dear Symm, Kevin,

I am prepared to have the information for only the past 2 years if
that is easier for you to make available.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Lawson

Dear Symm, Kevin,

in your response of 19th July 2010 you first copied in my request
then your response:

"Please could you provide me with the full set of data collected up
to May 2010 from the automated gas and electricity meter reading
equipment that Liverpool City Council has used for several years as
part of its energy management system?

Please could you also provide me with annual summary data about gas
and electricity use for each of the individual buildings monitored
by Liverpool City Council?

Response:

Please find attached information for all Liverpool City Council
premises."

However, you have only provided a response to the second part of my
request (the annual summary data), not the full data set.

Please could you send me the full data set,

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Lawson

Dear Mr. Symm,

I wish to challenge your assertion that the data I have requested
would take more than 18 hours to gather, collate and present.

In a separate FOI request that I made and that you have just
responded to, you stated that, in order to gather, store and
analyse the data from the automated gas and
electricity meter reading equipment that Liverpool City Council has
used for several years as part of its energy management system,
"Liverpool City Council uses the following: State of the Art's -
Eco Warrior - Tools, Eco Warrior - Guardian, Eco Warrior - Virtual,
Eco Warrior - Management Reports
[http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/42...

Furthermore, according to the website for the Eco Warrior software
[http://www.sotaew.co.uk/EcoWarrior.htm see also
http://www.sotaew.co.uk/ReportePro.htm] this software permits "Data
Saves To Floppy Disc If Required (1 year on one floppy disc)" and
"Automatic Data Saving To Hard Disc And Across Networks".

You should therefore be able to provide the data that I requested
within a few seconds or, at worst, a handful of minutes. I do not
need the data to be "presented". I requested the raw data.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Lawson

Dear Symm, Kevin,

The response to my request has been delayed. By law, Liverpool City
Council should normally have responded promptly and by 28 July
2010.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Lawson

Mr Symm,

Thank you for your response on 2 September 2010 to my request for
the automated energy meter reading data collected by Liverpool City
Council from their buildings.

You stated that the work to collect and present this information
from 160 sets of raw data would exceed 18 hours and, by example,
provided a copy of the raw data from the electricity meter at the
Liverpool Aquatics Centre from 1 April 2009 to 21 March 2010. This
runs to 42 pages of scanned A4 pages.

Needless to say, this was not in the format I indicated in my
earlier communications. Nor is it in a form that anyone would
reasonably expect such data to be provided in.

Can you confirm to me that this example set of raw data was printed
out from its tabulated electronic form onto paper, and then
manually rescanned by a fax machine or another low resolution
imaging device before being sent to me as a PDF?

Can you provide an explanation for why the data couldn't be saved
from its original electronic form and emailed to me?

Subject to your response, I expect to apply to the Information
Commissioner for a decision over this case.

Yours sincerely,

Rebecca Lawson