IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2020 - 8

President's Message

by Frede Blaabjerg

Guiding PELS Through the
COVID-19 Pandemic

he IEEE Power Electronics
Society (PELS) has now existed for more than 30 years, and
I think the current state of the world
has been our most challenging time.
Within a month and a half, the world
has come to a near standstill due to
the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The virus is tragic because it has
taken many lives and hit many families hard. In the future, many more
people will be affected as the economy is impacted significantly and the
virus continues to spread.
In this column, I had originally
planned to write about the developments at the IEEE Applied Power
Electronics Conference and Exposition
(APEC) 2020 in New Orleans, Louisiana, on 15-19 March. But one week
before the event, we found out that we
could not hold APEC as a physical event
because more and more people could
not travel, and companies were not allowed to send people to the conference.
In addition, countries one by one were
closing down completely. Therefore,
we decided to make APEC 2020 a virtual event and conduct some of the activities online. Such a transformation
requires many voluntary resources, and
I would like to thank all who have been
involved in this process-while at the
same time starting to plan APEC 2021.
This year, we were expecting a record high attendance at APEC 2020

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2020.2986841
Date of current version: 16 June 2020

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

crisis worsened around the world in
because our technology is needed all
April, there was no chance that these
over the world for many applications,
conferences could be held in person
and many companies are in the busiwhen web-based virtual conferences
ness of power electronics now. Uncould do the job. As a result, except for
fortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic
one or two conferences, they are now
made it impossible to hold the in-perall planned to be held after July, which
son event this year.
of course means the conference calTraditionally, at APEC, PELS has
endar might be crowded from August
organized all its meetings to keep the
to December. Kudos to the Vice PresiSociety running, for example, conferdent of Conferences
ence planning; our
Liuchen Chang who
seven technical comThe impact of COVID-19
has worked hard to
mittees; products
ensure that there
like journals, transacis expected to last a
are no overlapping
tions, and this magavery long time, so we
con fer ence s . T he
zine; the Adminishave encouraged all
l a r ge s t move h a s
trative Committee
conferences to offer
been the IEEE En(AdCom); and so on.
both options for
e r g y C o nv e r s io n
Although we had to
presenters-physical
Congress and Expocancel all in-person
sition (ECCE)-Asia,
meetings, PELS exand virtual
which is moved to
ecutives successfully
presentations.
No v e m b e r, a l o n g
managed to hold onwith many others.
line meetings with
The impact of COVID-19 is expected
many participants. A final AdCom
to last a very long time, so we have enmeeting was held virtually in late
couraged all conferences to offer both
April during which all issues related
options for presenters-physical and
to the 2020 and 2021 budgets were
virtual presentations-and thereby
discussed and many other new activibe able to publish the paper together
ties were approved. This shows that it
with a presentation. Later, all acceptis possible to successfully hold larger
ed papers will be included in the IEEE
virtual meetings without being physiXplore digital library. Consequently,
cally together.
we are offering a wide number of posCOVID-19 has affected PELS a
sibilities to authors. So please send
great deal and the IEEE as a whole.
your papers to those conferences and
Along with the changes at APEC, there
the upcoming conferences in 2021.
were many other PELS conferences to
Due to COVID-19, physical meetings
be held in the spring and summer of
have been very limited, and universities
2020 that needed reorganizing. As the

z June 2020

IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - June 2020

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