The IEEE Kansas Power & Energy Conference (KPEC 2020), led by the graduate student members of the IEEE IAS/PELS/PES joint chapter at Kansas State University’s Mike Wiegers ECE Department, held their 1st annual conference virtually on July 13-14, 2020. KPEC is a symposium of the research behind technologies for power and energy systems of the future. The KPEC 2020 featured 6 keynote speeches, 3 industry presentations by Evergy, Burns & McDonnell and Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, 3 tutorials by PEAS group and Typhoon HIL, 18 oral presentation sessions that each session was moderated by two session chairs with 6 different categories. The received papers were reviewed by several experts with double-blind method. Finally, 53 papers were accepted in the conference. Three of them were awarded in the closing remarks.  Among the accepted papers, KPEC had authors from eleven different countries. Further, participants from 21 states within the US and 42 academia and industry centers had contributions in this conference. KPEC 2020 keynote speakers were, professor Georges Zissis as the IEEE IAS president, Professor Frede Blaabjerg as the IEEE PELS president, Stanley Atcitty from Sandia national laboratories, Victor Veliadis as Executive Director and CTO of Power America, Tomas J. Overbye as TEES Eminent Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University and Anil Pahwa as Kansas State University Distinguished Professor. KPEC were financially supported by Sunflower Electric Power Corporation, Burns & McDonnell, Evergy, Typhoon HIL, PEAS group, Kansas State University college of engineering and ECE department. IEEE Kansas power and energy conference is technically supported by IEEE IAS, PELS and PES.

Welcome session, Left to right: Mitchell Easley (Co-director), Mohsen Hosseinzadehtaher (Co-director), Dr. Gruenbacher (ECE department head), Dr. Mohammad B. Shadmand (Conference lead adviser).

Key note speakers, first row, Left to right: Georges Zissis, Frede Blaabjerg, Stan Atcitty. Second row, left to right: Victor Veliadis, Thomas J. Overbye, Anil Pahwa.

Typhoon HIL Tutorials, Left to right: Boris Jovanovic(Typhoon HIL), David Zhang (PEAS group), Silvanus D’Silva (PEAS group), Murilo Almeida (Typhoon HIL).

Mohsen Hosseinzadeh Taher
Co-director:  Kansas Power and Energy Conference (KPEC)