IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020 - 88

infrastructure experts, policy makers,
and change management experts who
provided their views on the challenges
ahead and how they can be met. Panel
participants included
✔ Jim Robb, chief executive officer
(CEO), North American Electric
Reliability Corporation
✔ Marcelino Madrigal, former energy commissioner for Mexico and
currently with the Inter-American
Development Bank
✔ Stephen Dihwa, manager (CEO) of
the Southern African Power Pool
✔ David Sluss, Georgia Institute of
Technology.

Timely and emerging topics were
explored in various sessions during the
week, including the highly attended Super
Sessions. Industry leaders discussed the
following topics:
✔ management of the grid for reliability, resiliency, and sustainability
✔ technological advances
✔ resiliency
✔ high penetrations of renewable
resources
✔ storage
✔ risk-based system planning and
operation of the system.
Other highlights of the week featured the Awards Gala that recognized

outstanding achievements of IEEE PES
members and several student programs
as well as the Women in Power and Young
Professional programs. A corporate engagement event was also held involving
three U.S. corporate participants.
Our membership would greatly benefit by attending PES events ranging from
GMs, Innovative Smart Grid Technology
conferences, and the upcoming Transmission and Distribution Conference and
Exposition, which is scheduled for 20-23
April in Chicago. Local PES Chapters
also provide opportunities for sharing
experiences and learning together.

the product of volts and amps) are scalar
quantities and do not have direction. The
problems of the multiple meanings and
the adjectival use of a noun exist, to some
extent, because the IEEE Standards Dictionary is not curated; it simply grows as
new definitions appear in standards.
It would be a great service to the
profession if the IEEE were to manage
the dictionary more carefully. Out-ofdate and erroneous definitions could
be recorded as obsolete or removed,
and changes in meaning could even be
subject to committee approval.

T. H. Blakesley, Alternating Currents of Electricity. London: The Electrician, 1885.
W. R. LePage, Analysis of Alternating Currents. New York: McGrawHill, 1952.
J. O'Malley, Schaum's Outline of
Theory and Problems of Basic Circuit
Analysis, 2nd ed. (Schaum's Outline Series). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992, p. 221.
A. J. Hermont, "Precision measurement of phasors in electrical networks
as a function of frequency," Trans. AIEE,
vol. 73, no. 4, pp. 365-375, Sept. 1954.
J. C. Maxwell, "Sectional proceedings" Nature, Sept. 22, 1870, p. 422.
IEEE, IEEE Standards Dictionary Online, 2019. [Online]. Available:
https://innovate.ieee.org/ieee-stan
dards-dictionary-online/
B. A. Coghill, "Phasor-power method
of determining transformer sequence
impedances," Trans. AIEE, vol. 78, no.
3, pp. 112-119, Apr. 1959.
T. Wildi, Electrical Power Technology. New York: Wiley, 1981.

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history (continued from p. 82)
simply includes any definition that appears in a standard. For phasor, the first
PMU standard (IEEE Standard 13441994) had this definition:
Phasor: A complex equivalent of
a simple sine wave quantity such
that the complex modulus is the
sine wave amplitude and the
complex angle (in polar form) is
the sine wave phase angle.
Whether you think of a phasor as a line
or an exponent, it is, as we have noted,
a conceptual thing. Therefore, it cannot
be said to be "equivalent" to a sine wave
quantity because the word quantity implies a physical thing. As LePage said,
"A sinor does not represent a sinusoid in
the sense that an ordinary variable represents a quantity."
The term phasor has also been used
as an adjective. In a 1954 article, Coghill
describes earlier work: "They developed
the fundamental principles of a general
method of analysis based on the law of
conservation of phasor power, which they
referred to as the law of conservation of
power and reactive volt-amperes." He
seems to have forgotten that power (and
88

ieee power & energy magazine

Acknowledgment
I would like to acknowledge valuable
conversations with Dr. Louis Scharf,
particularly on the matter of the stationary phasor.

For Further Reading
H. Stockman and G. Hok, "A note on
frequency modulation terminology,"
Proc. IRE, pp. 181-183, Mar. 1944.
W. Thomson and P. G. Tait, Treatise
on Natural Philosophy. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1867.

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january/february 2020
https://innovate.ieee.org/ieee-standards-dictionary-online/ https://innovate.ieee.org/ieee-standards-dictionary-online/
IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2020

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