The Western Protective Relay Conference (WPRC) is an annual event held in the second half of each year in Spokane, Washington, USA. This is probably the  largest specialized conference in the field of electric power systems protection in the world. It is an educational forum organized by Washington State University for the presentation and detailed technical discussion of broad range of different aspects of protective relaying and related subjects.

The three days conference was held at the Spokane Convention Center from 20 to 22 October 2009.

Most of the attendees are from the western United States, but there were also participants from many countries from all over the world. This forum allows participants to learn about the latest protection and control technologies and how to apply these advanced technologies in order to prevent electrical power failures. Speakers from many different countries presented papers selected by the conference technical committee.

The conference program included fifty five papers covering different aspects of protection:

• Transmission
• Distribution
• Generator and motor
• Wide area
• Synchrophasor applications
• Communications

Considering the increasing interest in IEC 61850 for substation communications around the world, an interesting observation is the very limited number of papers (one) selected by the technical committee for presentation on this subject during the conference.

The papers were presented mostly in parallel sessions with breaks between the individual papers to allow the attendees to select between the two papers presented in each time slot.

After the end of each day sessions, the attendees had the opportunity to visit the vendor suites at the Red Lion Hotel at the Park. There they discussed in a relaxed atmosphere the latest devices and tools in our field offered by the different vendors.