The IEEE Power Engineering Society (PES) General Meeting was held at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida, USA 24 - 28 June 2007. This is an annual event that combines plenary session, technical and poster sessions, committee meetings, tutorials and other activities. Industry experts from all over the world attend the meeting to present their papers and discuss topics of interest with their colleagues.

The Tampa Convention Center is located directly on the waterfront in the heart of downtown Tampa and hosts a variety of conventions, tradeshows, and other special events year-round. It is built on the original site of Fort Brooke, the original American settlement on Tampa Bay from which Tampa grew. The land belonged to the Calusa tribe in the 16th century when Spanish expeditions reached the west coast of Florida. Today the city has population of about 350 thousand people. Tampa is a part of the Tampa-St. Petersburg -Clearwater metropolitan area, referred to as the Tampa Bay  with a total of 2.7 million residents.

PES President John McDonalt was the moderator of the Plennary session that followed the General Membership Meeting. The topic of the session was "Keeping the US Transmission System Reliable - National, Regional and State Perspectives".

Technical paper and panel sessions were scheduled Monday through Thursday and were grouped in several tracks covering:

• Understanding and responding to system events
• Securing new sources of energy
• Improving reliability and power quality
• Using innovative measurement and control techniques
• Surviving new markets and new structures

Many papers of interest to the protection, automation and control community were presented during the sessions included in the above tracks. Some examples are blackouts and restoration, analysis of faults and events using intelligent techniques, wind integration studies, performance characteristics and evaluation of PMUs.

Two sessions were dedicated to electric power systems protection. A total of 17 papers were included in both, with topics covering a wide range of protection related issues, such as protection testing, advanced methods for fault location, setting considerations and cyber security. New current differential schemes and other protection techniques were also discussed.

Super Sessions were a new concept introduced for the first time at this PES General Meeting. The idea is to allow experts from different domains to discuss subjects of common interest. They consist of a series of presentations that cover several aspects of the selected topic delivered by experts from different PES committees. "Working Closer to the Edge" was the first Super Session addressing issues related to the impact of increased load demand on existing transmission systems. "Vision 2020" was the second Super Session that was devided in three parts, with the last two being of more specific interest to the PAC community:

• Transmission and distribution
• Digital communications, cyber security and grounding
• Wide area systems

Six tutorials complemented the rich technical program of the conference. One on "Distribution automation" covered the impact of the latest technologies on distribution automation. "Power systems blackouts - causes and mitigation" provided a comprehensive review of power system stability problems leading to blackouts, as well as measures that can improve the security of the system and reduce the probability for wide area disturbances.

Many PES committees held their own meetings in parallel to the technical sessions. Different working groups also met as part of their committee meetings.

The Awards Luncheon was another important event held in the Flrida Ballroom of the Marriott hotel near the convention center. IEEE and PES award winners were honored at this event presided by John McDonald. Two IEEE PES Power System Relaying working groups received awards for:

• Outstanding Technical Report "Application considerations of IEC 61850/UCA2 for substation Ethernet local area network communication for protection and control" (chaired by John Burger)
• Outstanding Standard or Guide "IEEE Standard C37.119 Breaker Failure Protection" (chaired by Rogger Hedding)

The 2007 class of PES members elected as IEEE Fellows was also honored at the luncheon. John Tengdin, who is a member of both the Power System Relaying and the Substation committees was one of the new Fellows.