The number of U.S. households subscribing to Broadband over Power Line (BPL) will increase from 400,000 in 2007 to 2.5 million by 2011, according to a report from Parks Associates.
“Both consumer demand and business factors will drive this growth,” said Chris Roden, research analyst at Parks Associates. “On the consumer side, many rural residents don’t have access to DSL or cable, but every house in the U.S. has access to power lines.”
Power line communications technology can use the household electrical power wiring as a transmission medium, explains Wikipedia. Since the BPL signals do not propagate through the distribution transformers, extra equipment is needed to deliver the signal home.
The system also has a number of complex issues, the primary one being that power lines are inherently noisy. Every time a device turns on or off, it introduces a pop or click into the line. Energy-saving devices often introduce noisy harmonics into the line.
The HomePlug Powerline Alliance, a trade group with over 65 member companies, believes these problems can be overcome.
In other news, WiLight is a new wireless lighting control system that dims or switches overhead lighting, wirelessly. Developed by two researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, WiLight was designed to be low cost, and encourage building owners to retrofit facilities for energy efficiency.
Using a battery-less transmitter instead of a normal wall switch, and a radio bridge, a building manager can manually control the lighting system. Or the lights can dim or switch off automatically, in response to a signal from a demand-response server.
The WiLight transmitter uses a clever energy-scavenging technique developed by EnOcean to eliminate the need for batteries: the transmitter harvests the mechanical energy of the user’s clicking on the switch to charge up a radio transmitter that signals the transceiver to dim or switch the lights, eliminating batteries on the switch.
.gif)
