Sunnyvale, California’s First Pacific Networks Inc has announced PowerView 2.5, an upgrade of its FPN2000 metering system for electricity distributors. PowerView enables price changes made by the utilty to be relayed immediately to the customer’s metering system. It also enables short messages to be relayed to the customers warning them of impending price changes and to inform them if they are late paying their monthly bill. An external 80386-based Intelligent Utility Unit can control up to four homes simultaneously, using a LonWorks power line from Echelon Corp to connect to the homes. Echelon continues to beat Consumer Electronics Bus-compliant technologies into second place, and was chosen by First Pacific because it provided additional tools enabling the company to get its product out quicker, according to Andrea Merten, PowerView product line manager. The customers’ metering technology is provided by American Innovations Inc’s Powerlon technology, supporting in-home appliance control syst ems from Honeywell Inc and Raytheon Co. A PowerView Gateway provides the link between the Intelligent Utility Unit and the energy company’s backbone Ethernet network, culminating in a Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstation 5. PowerView 2.5 will be available in April, and Central & South West Corp will be the first utility company to deploy it, in a trial with 2,500 Laredo, Texas homes.
