ISGT Europe
Innovative Smart Grid Technologies (ISGT) Europe 2014, sponsored by the IEEE Power & Energy Society, was held on October 12-15, 2014 in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference was hosted by the PES Turkey Chapter and the Istanbul Technical University. Over 400 participants from 40 different countries attended to the conference.
ISGT Europe 2014 had 29 paper sessions and 2 poster presentations, 3 tutorials, 3 keynote speakers, 3 plenary sessions, and 9 panels. Topics covered included electric generation & storage technologies, integration of electric vehicles, demand side management, micro-grid operation and integration, smart grid communications and network security, energy management and electricity market, wide area network monitoring-operation and control, load forecasting, and smart grid protection.
The conference began with three interesting tutorial sessions. These sessions covered “Evolution of EMS Control Centers“ by Jay Giri, ”Electric Vehicle Charging in Electricity Distribution Systems” by Johan Driesen and “Cyber Security of Smart Grid” by Chen-Ching Liu.
The keynote speeches offered on three different days generated great interest as well. The keynote topics, “Energy Storage Market”, “Smart Grid Standard and Interoperability”, and “Implementing Smart Grid Communications”, were presented by Andrew Jones, John D McDonald and Li Haiyu respectively.
In the opening ceremony the Conference General Chair, Ömer Usta, said that the ISGT Europe 2014 actually formed a platform for the participants from all around world to discuss the cutting-edge innovations in the smart grid and associated technical developments to transform the existing grid into a smart grid including an increasing number of distributed energy resources and storage facilities. He then thanked the attendees for their great contributions to the ISGT Europe 2014 leading to the success of the conference.
PES President Miroslav Begovic updated the attendees on ongoing PES activities during this year and what is in store for 2015. President Begovic thanked the local organizing committee members individually for the great success of ISGT Europe 2014. He also offered thanks to the President of Istanbul Technical University, Mehmet Karaca, for providing University facilities in every stage of the conference. President Karaca then highlighted the history of the university and recent developments there. He also emphasized the importance of the electrical engineering profession, smart grids and related technologies.
Attendees had opportunity one-on-one contact with the professionals dealing with smart grid technologies throughout the plenary and panel sessions. PES President-elect Damir Novosel chaired the plenary session on “Feature Trends in Smart Grid”. Kai Strunz chaired the plenary session on “Innovative Smart Grid”, and the plenary session on “Wide Area Monitoring Protection and Control” was chaired by Jay Giri.
Panel session were also organized and chaired by experts from industry and academia. Panel topics were: Smart Grid Reliability, Energy Storage Technologies, Smart Supply Networks, and Smart Grid Security. Smart Distribution Networks, Smart Transmission Technologies and Transactive energy. The Smart Distribution Application panel was organized and sponsored by PES Women in Power.
In the paper sessions, 263 high quality papers were presented. while 29 oral presentation sessions offered 172 papers in four parallel tracks. The two Poster Sessions included 91 papers. These paper sessions provided a platform for the attendees to discuss the paper contents with the authors directly.
In addition to the welcome reception, two dinner receptions took place during the conference. While the first dinner was on two cruise boats traveling through the Bosphorus between Asia and Europe continents, the gala dinner was held in a restaurant by the Bosphorus Europe side.
The PES Executive Committee meeting and the PES Region 8 Chapter Training Meeting were held on October 11 and 12 respectively.