PowerTech 2007 was held 1-5 July 2007 in Lausanne, Switzerland. This was the seventh edition of the European anchor conference of the IEEE Power Engineering Society and was build on the tradition of excellence of the preceding conferences in Athens, Stockholm, Budapest, Porto, Bologna and St. Petersburg.

Lausanne, with its 250,000 inhabitants, is well placed in the center of continental Europe. It has a long history, starting as settlements in Neolitic times and following development through  different periods of European history, becoming the vibrant city it is today. It is also the home of the International Olympic Committee.

The PowerTech Conference is sponsored by the IEEE Power Engineering Society and was organized by the Energy Center of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), a leading European technological research university which brings together over 10'000 academics, researchers and students from 110 nationalities. It has a rich history starting from 1853 with the founding of the Ecole Spéciale de Lausanne, which later became the Ecole Polytechnique de l'Université de Lausanne (EPUL). In 1969, EPUL became EPFL, a federal institution and one of only two Swiss institutes of technology.

The EPFL campus was the conference venue that with its idyllic location on the shores of Lake Geneva, created a perfect environment for discussions on the present and future of electric power systems technology.

The papers presented at the conference were predominantly from representatives of many universities from countries from all continents and covered a wide range of topics such as:

• Power systems analysis, design, construction, control and operation
• Monitoring and diagnostics
• Information technologies, as they are implemented in electric energy systems
• Electric energy economic considerations
• Public policy implications on the planning and operation of modern power system
• Of more specific interest to the protection, automation and control community were:
• Integration of distributed generation in the main grids
• Power system dynamics and controls
• Cascading emergencies and blackouts
• Power system protection
• Power system instrumentation, measurements and automation
• Power system communication

Four sessions were dedicated to power system protection and control and a session on information technology concentrated on the impact of IEC 61850 on substation automation systems.