THE MOST POWERFUL MEETINGS IN THE WORLD

PES Conferences offer opportunities that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet. At PES conferences you can meet with the best and the brightest in the industry, have great professional networking, continue your education, keep up with the latest technology, gain hands on experience with new equipment, interface with the manufacturers developers of the latest programs and processes.

For the last several years we have striven to make our conferences as valuable to our members as possible. With the initiative to have our conferences obtain a good balance between real world solutions and academic content, we have moved in that direction. If you examine our conference programs with any of our conferences you will see more and more industry presentation and involvement than in past years. The outreach to Utility Executives has made this even more effective and we have been able to have several “Executive Round Tables” at many of our meetings. These have attracted engineers not only interested in real world problems but where the industry is going and what does the future hold for it.

We continue to work hard at keeping the cost of attending a PES conference as cost effective as possible. This involves partnering with venues, hotels and suppliers whenever and were ever possible.

We also have initiatives underway to reach more of our younger engineers. Every conference marketing plan has a social media aspect to it. And in the tracking the demographics of our conferences we see that involvement of younger engineers beginning to gain more and more momentum.

The Governing Board has received positive feedback on the initiative to be more visible to our members and conferences have been a big part of that initiative, with at least one GB member attending all our conferences and meetings throughout the year.

The remainder of 2017 and all of 2018 are full of great meetings and conferences for IEEE PES Members, in fact, they are great for anyone interested in power and the power industry.The remainder of 2017 and all of 2018 will continue the initiative to balance of real-world practical applications and future technological advances.

The remainder of 2017 has conferences in China, (EI2 2017), New Zealand (ISGT Asia, 2017), and Saudi Arabia (SASG 2017).

While January of 2018, has a JTCM in Jacksonville, FL, USA. February ISGT NA 2017 in Washington, D.C., USA.

April brings the mainstay of PES conferences with the IEEE PES T&D Conference and Exposition in Denver, CO. If you have never been to the T&D Show, you have an experience in store for you. T&D is the biggest and best Conference and Exposition in the Power Industry. T&D has been named, three times in the Top 50 Conferences in the U.S. (Trade Shows Executives Magazine), the first and only IEEE Conference to receive that honor.  Also, the IEEE Conferences Committee recognized T&D with the first IEEE ICOM Award for Innovation, Content Curation, Community Building, Financial Stability, and Growth. We like to say, “If you can only make one conference this year, T&D is the one.”

Then in May we have the ISGT Asia meeting in Singapore, with June having the IEEE Transportation Electrification Conference & Expo (ITEC-2018) in Long Beach, CA.

In August, if you are a member of PES and are involved, or want to be involved, or if you are not a member and want to know the real work of PES, you don’t want to miss the PES General Meeting (PES GM 2018) in Portland, OR, USA.

September brings T&D Latin America in Lima, Peru. While October has the2018 ISGT Europe in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. And we finish the year of 2018 Conferences in November with the SG4SC 2018 in Genk, Belgium.

You can find more information on any of these conferences on the PES website at https://www.ieee-pes.org/meetings-and-conferences.

In closing, we also would like to encourage all members to get involved, especially the newer members of PES. Conferences are a wonderful place to volunteer and is extremely rewarding both professional and personally.

Please let me know any comments, areas for improvement, critiques and any thoughts that you feel would improve our conferences, I can be reached at t.w.mayne@ieee.org. If you use the subject “IDEAS TO IMPROVE OUR CONFERENCES” if would be helpful.

Thanks for all you do.
Tommy Mayne