IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2021 - 10

leader's corner

SO MUCH HAS CHANGED IN THE
past year-how we get our food, get our
children to school, do our work, and
learn. IEEE Power & Energy Society
(PES) meetings and conferences are no
exception. Some keywords we heard in
2020 were reposition, change, new normal, shift, rethink, reset, change course,
modify, reset, and, of course, pivot.
Last year's PES General Meeting
had to pivot from a face-to-face meeting to a virtual one in fewer than 100
days. This was the first major event for
PES that changed from in person to
virtual. It is also one of our largest conferences, after the biannual IEEE PES
Transmission and Distribution (T&D)
Conference and Exposition. Needless
to say, it was not a small task, but, with
a very qualified team in place made
up of volunteers and PES professional
staff supporting us every step of the
way, it resulted in a great event. A special thanks to General Meeting Steering Committee Chair William Cassel
and his team for a job well done.
The theme of the General Meeting
was " Are Big Data, Machine Learning,
and Electric Transportation Transforming the Grid? " There were more than
2,200 attendees from 69 different countries, 130 panel sessions, 617 papers
presented via video, and a very successful PES members meeting and plenary session. We were thrilled to have
David Murray, chief technology officer
from Hydro Québec, as our keynote
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2021.3057948
Date of current version: 19 April 2021

ieee power & energy magazine

Jessica Bian and Wayne Bishop Jr.

pivot to virtual
meetings, conferences, and lifelong learning

speaker. For the General Meeting and
all of our PES virtual conferences, it
has been important that these events
be offered for the benefit of PES members. We lowered the registration cost
to US$99 for PES members and kept
the technical presentations online until
the end of August. After that, presentations were transferred to the PES Resource Center. Again, this was done as
a service to our members.
Several other PES conferences also
pivoted to a virtual format, including
the following:
✔✔ Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) Europe, which focuses on smart grid technologies
✔✔ PowerAfrica
✔✔ Latin America T&D Conference
✔✔ PowerCon in Asia
✔✔ Smart Cities Conference.
When this column was written, finishing touches were being put on the
ISGT North America Conference on
16-18 February 2021. Normally, this
conference would be held in Washington, D.C., but this year's gathering is virtual, with exciting keynote
speeches from
✔✔ Dennis Arriola, CEO of Avangrid
✔ ✔ Gil Quiniones, president and
CEO of New York Power Authority
✔ ✔ Eliot Mainzer, president and
CEO of California Independent
System Operator.
If there is any silver lining to COVID-19, it is that you can now attend a
vast variety of global PES conferences

in a virtual environment. No need to
book a hotel room or plane ticket, but,
instead, enjoy the technical programs
of PES conferences from the comfort
of your home and office. For example,
at the 2020 PowerAfrica Conference,
we had 347 attendees from 45 different countries. In 2019, we had only 28
different countries represented. Please
consider attending and experiencing a
PES conference outside your Region.
With all of the changes happening
in the electric power industry, it is vital
to share this knowledge and expertise
with our members. This becomes even
more important during a pandemic,
when most of us are not able to have
the " water-cooler talks " and hallway
informal conversations with colleagues
in the industry. Please know that PES
is here for you now more than ever. We
are your knowledge resource through
the PES Resource Center, award-winning publications, virtual meetings and
conferences, tutorials, webinars, and
more being held around the world.
As a part of PES's long-range strategic planning, the Society has been
offering what our members most need
to learn over the decades. How long
is your degree going to last? Back in
the 1960s, the half-life of knowledge
was a phrase attributed to economist
Fritz Machlup, who studied, among
other things, the economic value of
knowledge. It is the amount of time
that elapses before half of the knowledge in a particular area is superseded
or shown to be untrue. Machlup and
-others of his day discovered that, while
may/june 2021

IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - May/June 2021

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