Hong Chen
The power and energy industry is at its most exciting time, undergoing many transformational changes: transition to clean and sustainable energy, high penetration of inverter-based resources, energy storage, electrification, and grid edge technologies, just to name a few. Our industry is having more innovation than in any generation since Edison, and playing a key role in combating climate change, facilitating decarbonization, decentralization, and digitization. The IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES), as the world’s largest forum for sharing the latest in technology developments in our industry, is well situated to lead the charge towards net-zero 2050
As the vice president of IEEE PES Technical Activities, I serve as the chair of the PES Technical Council and oversee PES technical activities: lead technical committees for the evaluation and dissemination of technical information in its field of interests and coordinate with other societies and professional organizations.
The PES Technical Council coordinates the activities of 17 technical committees and four coordinating committees. The masthead of this magazine has the names of the current committee chairs. The committee details are available at each technical committee’s website and from the PES technical activities website (https://ieee-pes.org/technical-activities/). The committees and their subcommittees lead the creation and maintain the standardization of technical documents related to the committee’s scopes of activities, including technical reports, white papers, and notably IEEE standards.
Close to 50% of IEEE standards were developed by the PES technical committees. In 2022, PES created 47 new standards and revised 36 existing standards. This year up to March 2023, PES created six new standards and revised six existing standards.
The technical reports, white papers, and webinars produced by PES committees are archived in the PES Resource Center. Table 1 shows the technical committees with the most products and Table 2 lists the technical committees with the most product downloads.
Table 1. Technical committees with the most products.
Table 2. Technical committees with the most product downloads.
All PES members receive monthly PES Trending Technology and PES eBulletin emails. PES Trending Technology emails highlight influential industry subjects, related papers, articles, presentations, webinars, tutorials, and which committee(s) cover the subjects. The “Technical Activities” section of the PES eBulletin also has technical committee-related information, such as upcoming technical committee meetings and newly published technical reports.
One of the responsibilities of the Technical Council is the design and planning of the technical program of the annual IEEE PES General Meeting (GM), including the planning of the super sessions, panel sessions, technical paper sessions, and poster sessions. The conference paper review is coordinated by the technical committees and the panel sessions are also planned by the technical committees. For 2023 PES GM, the following four supersession topics were selected:
Based on these supersession topics, the theme for the 2023 PES GM is “Meeting the Energy Needs of a Dynamic World.” Our technical committees also planned more than 140 panel sessions. I look forward to seeing everyone at this year’s GM, in the center of the Sunshine State in Orlando, Florida, USA.
In later 2022, we set the following three goals, aligning with PES’s Strategic Direction for 2022–2025.
IEEE PES is a global organization, and technical activities are for all PES members around the world. Due to language and geographic barriers, some PES members have difficulty getting involved in technical committee activities. As a result, satellite technical committees were created under Chapters Councils. Recently, these satellite technical committees have been moved from Chapters Councils to a newly created standing committee, the Localized Technical Activities Committee, under the vice president of technical activities. This change brings important localized technical activities under the vice president of technical activities, to improve governance and interaction with technical committees, increase transparency and visibility, as well as provide additional support to local volunteers. The Satellite Technical Committees Organization and Procedures Manual was created and approved early this year to formalize the process. This effort supports the goal of “increase global participation.”
All IEEE PES members can get involved in technical committee activities through different avenues, such as:
I want to take this opportunity to encourage you all to get involved in PES technical activities: learn, serve, and contribute, help PES further our mission of “being the leading provider of scientific and engineering information on electric power and energy for the betterment of society.” Together, we foster innovation and produce solutions for reliable electricity! Together, we work to create clean, affordable, and sustainable energy solutions worldwide!
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2023.3269539
Date of current version: 21 June 2023
1540-7977/23©2023IEEE