Power Control deals with routing electric power, controlling its quality, and controlling the devices attached to a power line.

A number of technologies have evolved for using the power wiring to turn devices attached to the power line on and off, monitoring attached devices, and similar activities. A collective term for one set of technologies is smart buildings. It should be mentioned that unlike within commercial buildings smart building technologies within peoples homes have been less than an overwhelming success. Problems include reliability, cost, questions about how great the need is, and the fact that many smart building tasks such as turning on a lamp at dusk can be performed equally well by simpler, cheaper, and often more reliable, mechanical or electro-mechanical devices. The best known smart building technologies for the home environment are X10

X10 (industry standard)

X10 is an international and open industry standard for communication among electronic devices used for home automation, also known as domotics. It primarily uses power line wiring for signaling and control, where the signals involve brief radio frequency bursts representing digital information...

 and CEBus

CEBus

CEBus, short for Consumer Electronics Bus, also known as EIA-600, is a set of electrical standards and communication protocols for electronic devices to transmit commands and data...

 and for the commercial Lonworks

LonWorks

LonWorks is a networking platform specifically created to address the needs of control applications. The platform is built on a protocol created by Echelon Corporation for networking devices over media such as twisted pair, powerlines, fiber optics, and RF...

, DyNet

Dynalite

Dynalite is a product range of Phillips lighting. Up until 2009 Dynalite was also the name of the company which manufactured and sold the product until it was bought by Phillips...

, DSI

Digital Signal Interface

Digital Signal Interface is a protocol for the controlling of lighting in buildings . It was created in 1991 by Austrian company Tridonic and is based on Manchester-coded 8-bit protocol, data rate of 1200 baud, 1 start bit, 8 data bits , 4 stop bits, and is the basis of the more sophisticated...

, DALI

Digital Addressable Lighting Interface

Digital Addressable Lighting Interface is a technical standard for network-based systems that control lighting in buildings. It was established as a successor for 0-10 V lighting control systems, and as an open standard alternative to Digital Signal Interface , on which it is based...

 and analog

0-10V lighting control

0-10 V is one of the earliest and simplest electronic lighting control signaling systems; simply put, the control signal is a DC voltage that varies between zero and ten volts. The controlled lighting should scale its output so that at 10 V, the controlled light should be at 100% of its...

 systems.

See also domotics, Universal Plug and Play

Universal Plug and Play

Universal Plug and Play is a set of networking protocols for primarily residential networks without enterprise class devices that permits networked devices, such as personal computers, printers, Internet gateways, Wi-Fi access points and mobile devices to seamlessly discover each other's presence...

 (UPnP), distributed generation

Distributed generation

Distributed generation, also called on-site generation, dispersed generation, embedded generation, decentralized generation, decentralized energy or distributed energy, generates electricity from many small energy sources....

.