IPA FE Subject A sample Question 54

Connecting a household's solar generation, appliances and sensors to a home network to visualise and control energy use — HEMS, the home energy management system.

HEMS works at the scale of one home: it measures how much electricity each appliance uses and how much the solar panels generate, shows it to the residents, and switches or adjusts devices to optimise consumption. The same idea at other scales has other names, which the wrong options describe.

Answer (a)

Why not others:

• •(b) — visualising and controlling the energy of a whole city's infrastructure, street lamps and transport included, is a smart city (community energy management, CEMS)
• •(c) — collecting vehicle and road data from in-car sensors over a network to support efficient driving is telematics, the connected car
• •(d) — monitoring vibration, temperature and sound of factory machines to replace parts at the right time is predictive (condition-based) maintenance

Key rule: Energy management systems are named by their scope: HEMS for a home, BEMS for a building, FEMS for a factory, CEMS for a community.

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