Conference Reports News

PAC World Americas Conference 2024 – PACWAC

The event was held 12-15 August 2024 at the Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh, NC, USA.

Monday afternoon the program included a tutorial on the “Evolution of Digital Substations” which covered centralized and virtualized digital substations, their functional testing, as well as cyber security of centralized digital substations. 

Conference attendees later participated in the traditional welcome reception which this year was held at the exhibition area of the Raleigh Convention Center. It was combined with the PAC Demo Hour+. 

The Conference opening Tuesday morning was followed by the Keynote address on “The Evolving Grid and Use of Low-Power Instrument Transformers (LPIT) for Monitoring, Protection, Automation, and Control” presented by Dr. Farnoosh Rahmatian, Fellow IEEE, past Chair of the IEEE Power & Energy Society’s (PES) Technical Council.

The two-and-a-half days conference program included 38 papers presented in single sessions and covering a wide range of topics. As is a tradition for all PAC World conferences – there were no parallel sessions. The authors of the papers were from many countries from all over the world.

The papers were presented in the paper sessions including 15 min presentations followed by a discussion of all the papers at the end of each session.

Following the experience and the positive feedback from last year’s conference the last papers at the opening day of the conference were replaced by a utility panel on the Challenges in Introducing IEC 61850, which triggered a lot of lively discussions due to the criticality of the topic to the participants in the conference.

The papers presented at the conference covered a wide range of topics related to the developments of electric power systems protection and control technologies, the evolution in the implementation of IEC 61850 in digital substations, distribution automation and system integrity protection schemes. A number of papers were focused on various aspects of testing of protection and control devices and systems, while others talked about cyber security,

The traditional “Ask the experts” panel was at the first part of the last session in the conference program. The lively interactive discussion was a great opportunity for the participants to cover a wide range of topics and answer questions submitted in advance or raised during the session. 

After many years in other venues the gala dinner took place at the Marbles Kids Museum, which offered a unique chance for the participants to visit the museum and learn about the efforts to help kids’ education. It was also an opportunity to spend some time with all the new friends and enjoy the excellent menu. This was followed by the photo competition awards ceremony and a lot of fun with local actors.