IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2014 - 100

The theme for the year's plenary session was shaping the future energy industry.

regional opportunities to participate in
Pes activities, she added.
schulz showed a graphic of The
Pipeline, a concerted effort to attract
and retain Pes members from grades
K-12 through senior technical leadership, which remains an ongoing priority for the society. one measure of
success in these efforts: global Pes
membership surpassed 30,000 in 2013,
and student chapters have grown 100%
over the past four years, schulz said.
The year 2013 was the year of the
volunteer, and Pes efforts focused on
raising awareness of the opportunities for volunteer leadership in myriad
areas, from Pes governance to technical committees. Looking ahead, Pes
candidates for president-elect, secretary, and treasurer were given the floor
to articulate their view of the society's
priorities for 2014-2015.
Past-President al Rotz made an
eloquent plea for support for the Pes
scholarship Plus program, designed to
assist undergraduate students in north
america. The program awarded 228
scholarships at 100 universities last
year, more than double the prior year.

Themes at the
Plenary Panel
The opening day's plenary panel focused
on the General meeting's theme,
"shaping the future energy industry,"
100

ieee power & energy magazine

and offered a diverse glimpse into the
successes and challenges of grid modernization from the perspective of the
conference's
host
utility, a vendor, and
a researcher.
bc hydro's executive vice president
for transmission and
distribution, Greg
Reimer, welcomed
attendees and said
that british columbia's outsized natural
beauty and resources
came with considerable challenges.
The province is
larger than france
and Germany combined, with only 4.5
million people, leaving vast swaths of
rural c ountry. The province runs
on more than 90% renewable energy
in the form of hydro power but taking that power to unders erved rural
areas via new transmission lines chall e n g e s b c h y d r o planners, according to Reimer. native and resident
sensitivity to transmission line routing
and tower siting means that planning
new T lines, rather than building them,
is the more difficult task.
edmund schweitzer, founder of
schweitzer engineering Laboratories,

inc. (seL), said that as protection
schemes have become digital and distributed, control designs and devices
would follow suit.
The challenge of the
future, schweitzer
said, is to develop
technology and analytics to anticipate
and prevent instability, particularly
on a grid with faster
dynamics and intermittent, renewable
generation sources.
Ultimately, the grid
would benefit from
automated,
wide
area control, he said.
mark mcGranahan, vice president
for power delivery and utilization at
the electric Power Research institute
(ePRi), articulated the difference
between reliability and resilience.
improving the latter, a topic highlighted by hurricane sandy, is a threepronged challenge: prevention (grid
hardening), response, and customer
resilience. hardening covers traditional practices such as vegetation management and selective undergrounding
of power lines but might extend to new
hydrophobic coatings that prevent ice
buildup. smart grid technologies are

A well-attended
super session,
"Managing
Extreme Events,"
provided
insights [about]
the impacts of
recent extreme
weather events.

january/february 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2014