The IEEE Power & Energy Society's 2008 General Meeting was held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA
The IEEE Power & Energy Society's 2008 General Meeting was held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA from 20 to 24 of July, 2008. It was co-hosted by Allegheny Power and Duquesne Light.
The General Meeting is a forum for professionals from the different fields in our industry that allows them to get together and discuss the challenges of today and the ideas for the future. This is spread over a wide range of activities included in the five day program:
All activities are centered on the main theme of the conference - Conversion and Delivery of Electrical Energy in the 21st Century.
The preferential technical topics supporting the theme were organized into a number of tracks:
The conference also included several Super Sessions, designed to explore the selected topics from a number of different perspectives.
The topics were:
A special student program for IEEE PES student members included a Student/ Faculty/Industry luncheon and Poster Contest.
The Organizing Committee scheduled a number of interesting technical tours allowing the participants to visit a substation, a power quality laboratory, power electronics, fuel cells and other power and energy related technology facilities.
The Welcome Reception was held on the Gateway Clipper Riverboats, allowing the attendees not only to enjoy the beautiful Pittsburgh skyline, but meet new and old friends.
The Super Sessions were some of the key events that challenged the participants to look at new ways of doing things as a result of the trends in our industry. Some of them were more closely related to protection, automation and control.
The Super Session on Distributed Generation focused on distributed resources (DR) and covered sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery energy storage technologies, small-hydro and photovoltaic systems, as well as residential Combined Heat and Power (CHP) technologies.
The Super Session "Vision 2020" included presentations on how different technical fields will impact the electric network development in the year 2020. The contributions covered the following technical fields:
Emerging Technologies in Support of Smart Grids was the theme of another Super Session. It attempted to clarify the definition of a "Smart Grid" as the use of advanced technologies to improve the performance of electric utility systems with performance including:
The above goals can be achieved using distributed data communication, computing and control technologies, efficient transfer of data and control between many distributed field units.
Another major event in the program was the PES Awards Luncheon. Many IEEE Power & Energy Society awards were presented to engineers from different fields and generations. Two of them were from the field of protection, automation and control: Stan Horowitz received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award and Karen Miller received the 2007 Walter Fee Outstanding Young Engineer Award .
The IEEE Fellows Reception gave an opportunity to the attendees at the conference to meet the IEEE Fellows from the Class 2008. Three of them are distinguished members of the PAC community - Dr. Bogdan Z. Kasztenny, Canada; Vahid Madani and Kenneth Martin, USA.