The motto of the 2010 IEEE PES event was "Smart Solutions for a Changing World".

The 2010 IEEE Power and Energy Society Transmission and Distribution Conference and Exposition was held 19-22 April 2010 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. This is a very large event that brings together representatives of all different industries that have something to do with electric power transmission and distribution around the world. This has benefits and drawbacks.

• The benefits are that participants can see everything that is going on in the industry
• The drawback is that there are too many parallel activities that make it difficult to participate in everything that may be of interest.

A big focus of the event is the education of the community. That is why the program during the first day of the conference is focused on tutorials. From the eight tutorials available during the day, of interest to the PAC community were: – DNP3 fundamentals and real life applications, smart grid and advanced integrated distribution management system (IDMS), as well as breaker failure protection.

Other forms of presentations and discussions of subjects of interest to the industry were super sessions, technical panel sessions, special interest and poster sessions. Supposedly due to the significant interest of the electric power industry in smart grid issues and technologies, the protection and control papers were all moved to poster sessions – a format that not for the first time has proven not successful (see the picture from the poster session).

The exhibition can be considered a very different form of education. The exhibits gave the visitors a unique opportunity to see and touch the latest technology and meet the people who are bringing it to the market in this changing world. Among the products on display of interest to the PAC community were system protection, control and communication devices, monitoring and testing equipment, SCADA, EMS, distribution automation, demand-side management, AM/FM, GIS, GPS, customer information systems, meters, and metering devices, telecommunication systems, computer hardware and software systems.