IEEE PES typically observes its annual day in the month of April every year and as part of the IEEE PES Day 2020 Activities. IEEE PES Day 2020 in conjunction with the IEEE PES YP Continuing Education Program (CEP) hosted a series of online webinars covering the recent developments in power industry.


Fig 1 : IEEE PES Day Educational Activities Flyers

The online webinar series kicked off on April 24th on the hot topic of “Distributed Energy Resources (DER), Interconnection Challenges, and Solutions”. The guest speaker for this session was Mr. Babak Enayati, who currently works at National Grid, MA for the Innovative Technology Deployment Team and serves as a member on the IEEE PES Governing Board. The topic attracted large numbers of students, professors, and working professionals across the globe with members from Regions 1-10. The webinar provided a brief introduction about the existing electric grid and its operational limits while pointing out the different challenges that are experienced by the present-day utilities due to the high DER penetration. Besides, the session had some interesting graphs and practical examples of distribution circuits load profiles, feeder layouts, and different recloser coordination schemes. The session also included the upcoming technologies and interconnection standards that will give the utilities more flexibility with monitoring & control and strengthen the reliability of the protection schemes.

Following the webinar on April 24th the next webinar was held on April 27th on the topic of “Applications of AI in Power Industry” and the guest speaker for this session was Mr. Shishir Sekhar who currently works towards new business development initiatives and strategies in Power & Energy Industry at Math Works Inc. The session provided a brief discussion on Machine Learning vs Deep Learning and various applications where each has been implemented. Furthermore, the session went to show some working applications along with some simulated graphs and techniques for predictive maintenance of Gas turbine, Wind Farm fault classification, and estimating the remaining useful life of various equipment. Most of these applications use historic data to predict the milestones of the various equipment.

The Webinar series ended on April 29th with a session on “Offshore Wind Energy”. The guest speaker for this session was Mr. David Torrey who currently works as Senior Principal Engineer at GE’s Global Research Centre at NY. This session was mainly focused on the Generator & Converter Design characteristics of the wind turbine along with the power controller design parameters. Besides, the session covered the various locations of the existing offshore wind farms on the US East Coast region along with the Levelized Cost of Energy (LOCE) of various Wind Turbine Drive Terrains.

In conclusion, with over 692 participants from 45 Countries (see Figure 2), the webinars provided a platform for free learning and tutoring on different topics that are widely explored and researched in the Power Industry.


Figure 2: Average Number of Attendee/Region for Webinar Three Webinars Combined.

The webinars also received highly positive feedback from the participants encouraging the leadership team to host webinars like these more often in the future and were very helpful.

The IEEE PES Day leadership team and the IEEE YP CEP team would like to thank all the speakers and the participants across the world and appreciate the support and hope to see the same engagement in our future activities.

Stay Safe. We are always looking for motivated volunteers and please reach out to us to collaborate.

IEEE PES Day YP CEP Team
Rahul Pantagada
Bala Chiranjeevi Kotharu