AEP Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Nick Akins recently spoke to participants in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Power & Energy (PES) Society’s 2020 Workshop on Interconnections of Renewables/Energy Storage to Electric Grids. In his remarks, Akins outlined the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy and AEP’s growing capital investment in transmission, distribution and renewables – which now totals 85-percent of AEP’s current capital investment. He discussed the challenges facing the electric industry and the focus on improving power grid resilience and reliability for customers. Akins stressed the importance of data, analytics and new technology, and he reminded engineers to continue to help the public understand the transition underway in the industry, The four-hour workshop included presentations from utilities, power industry consultants and university researchers. Topics included DER impacts on distribution systems & substations, sustainability challenges for utilities, situation awareness of distribution systems, California energy markets, and data analytics for utilities. There were 304 attendees participating in this workshop in total with almost 30% of them from outside of United States. A number of great feedback were received. The post-event survey results show that 36% of the responded attendees consider the workshop “exceeds his/her expectation” and another 53% of the responded attendees consider the workshop “good”. In addition, 92% of the responded attendees want to join the workshop next time. At this workshop, Xuan also announced that Bob Bradish and Prakash Shrestha were selected to win the 2020 Outstanding Engineer and Outstanding Young Engineer Awards, respectively, by IEEE PES Columbus Chapter, for their continuous support to local professional communities and the contributions they made at their leadership/engineer roles.
