As a first step in dealing with surging energy prices, Free Power Corporation Limited (FPCL) has installed Smart Meters, which generate energy readings every thirty minutes, in households across London in order to analyze consumers’ energy usage. As a new data engineer for the power company, your task is to ingest the data from the Smart Meter readings and stream it to FPCL data centers for processing. Using the Kafka command-line tool, you’ll create topics in a Kafka cluster for storing the data, and you’ll create partitions for distributing the load within the topics. You’ll add logic to deal with potential problems such as data loss and duplicate records, and you’ll add a method to convert the energy readings to the widely used, easy-to-parse JSON format before the final step of ingesting the data. When you’re finished, FPCL will have pertinent data for analyzing energy consumption patterns, and you’ll have practical experience using Kafka to ingest large amounts of data.