The Annual PAC World conference was held 17 – 19 June 2024 in Athens, Greece.
This was the second time that the conference came to the Balkans after visiting Sofia in 2018. The Eugenides Foundation Conference Center in Athens was the conference venue.
It was attended by protection, automation and control specialists from 35 countries from all over the world representing utilities, suppliers, consultants and academia.
The conference was preceded on Monday by a half-day tutorial on “Evolution of digital substations” presented by Dr. Alexander Apostolov, USA. It focused on the centralization and virtualization of substation protection and control systems.
The tutorial and registration were followed by the welcome reception that was held in the Eugenides Foundation Ballroom.
The conference opening Tuesday morning was followed by the keynote presentation “The Emerging Security Framework in Europe in the Light of the Energy Transition” by Dr. Yannis Kampouris, CEO of SELENE CC and Director in IPTO.
The conference program included three full days of paper sessions.
Sixty papers from all continents were presented in eleven sessions. The end of each session was a fifteen minutes discussion of the presented papers.
As is already an established tradition the Thursday morning session before the lunch break was an Interactive Session – Ask the Experts.
Participants in the conference submitted some of their questions in advance or asked them directly during this interactive session, resulting in very interesting and lively discussions on various topics of interest to the participants.
During the coffee and lunch breaks the participants in the conference visited the exhibition area to see demonstrations of the latest protection, automation and control devices and tools by experts from leading global suppliers.
The conference gala dinner was held at the Okra restaurant which offered a nice atmosphere and an amazing view of the Acropolis. The awards ceremony for the photo contest followed the excellent food and entertainment that created a nice environment for the participants to make new friends and have fun.
Friday’s program included a guided bus trip to the city of Lavrion and a technical visit to the IPTO (Independent Power Transmission Operator of Greece) Substation of Lavrion.
