Between 13th and 16th December 2017, the third Zagreb Energy Congress (ZEC) took place at The Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, organized by members of the IEEE Student Branch Zagreb.

First conference was held in 2015. Participants had the opportunity to listen to lectures of compelling speakers from the field of Power engineering, visit the Hydroelectric Power Plant Čakovec and Solvis – company that manufactures photovoltaic modules. The importance of the conference, along with the academic community, was recognized by the rector of the University of Zagreb and the conference was awarded with the Chancellor’s Prize for community service work in the academic and wider community in 2015/2016. Zagreb Energy Conference 2016 was recognized by the IEEE community by awarding it the Darrel Chong Student Activity Silver Award in 2017 for the exemplary student activity of the IEEE Student Branch Zagreb. Last year conference was held on December 8-10, 2016. The program was designed in form of three parts, lectures, industry visits and workshops. Apart from the academic and industry activities, visitors were able to enjoy “Advent in Zagreb”, an event in Zagreb which was voted „Best Christmas Market“ for the year 2015, 2016 and now 2017.

This year we slightly altered the name from Zagreb Energy Conference to Zagreb Energy Congress, to better describe the nature of the event and expanded it to four days. Guests from Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Czech Republic attended the conference, as well as guests from Croatian cities of Rijeka and Osijek. Congress consisted of two days of lectures, first of which was for industry based topics such as, Wind Farms (Stjepan Čerkez, SIEMENS GAMESA RENEWABLE ENERGY), Tackling climate change and energy poverty from citizens’ perspective (Maja Božičević Vrhovčak, DOOR), Energy Efficiency of industrial plants and Wildpoldsried (Dalibor Marković, SIEMENS d.d.). Second day of Congress was reserved for technical visit to Bracak Energy Centre and Končar Electrical Engineering Institute. On Friday we had academy day during which professors were presenting current projects that they are working on, such as Croatian Low Emission Development Strategy – Power System Perspective (doc.dr.sc. Ivan Rajšl), Fault-tolerant Control of a Wind Turbine with Generator Electromechanical Faults (doc.dr.sc. Vinko Lešić), Influence of external factors on the performances of the PV systems (doc.dr.sc. Danijel Topić) and many others. During the last day participants had opportunity to take part in pub quiz and to make new connections. The Congress was held at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb.

B. Pećanac
IEEE Student Branch Zagreb, PES Chairman