Juan Carlos Montero
The ieee power & energy Society (PES) provides many opportunities and benefits to its members worldwide and continuously seeks ways to expand its support for them. PES membership is truly global, with most of the members residing outside the United States. We are proud not only of our overall numbers but also of the wide extent of volunteerism evident in our membership and our ability to attract young engineers and students, who have revitalized our activities and initiatives.
As a community, we benefit from the strength of our diversity and wide variety of technical and nontechnical backgrounds, including utilities, municipalities, regional transmission organizations and independent system operators, academics, researchers, equipment manufacturers, system suppliers, government officials, regulators, test labs, consultants, and many others.
I am from Costa Rica, and I work as the system operator at the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad. I am also the PES treasurer, and I am really happy to share that we continue working to seek growth in the support of our volunteers worldwide.
PES is in very good financial health thanks especially to our publications and conference activities. I would like to thank all of our volunteers who dedicate so many hours to promote and run our technical activities. PES does great things through its volunteers, and we should provide them with the tools to make their activities easier for them.
The PES Board is promoting, through our vice presidents, more new initiatives to use more of our financial reserves and provide a better service to our community. One successful initiative was the IEEE PES Grid Edge Technologies Conference & Exposition last April in San Diego. We had an amazing new conference with new technologies on the showroom floor and very interesting panels. If you were there, you were lucky to listen to top leaders in the energy field. If you attended the panels, you were lucky to share the latest developments in your passion of the work field! As non-U.S. volunteer, I have to say that this IEEE conference was an amazing opportunity to learn about new products and topics that will support my work at Costa Rica.
It was strategic for PES to start new conferences in non-T&D years, as we call the years that we are not running our first-class PES T&D Conference and Exposition. This is an example of a new initiative—a new idea that can grow big, from our volunteers to real life . . . to our community.
Keep thinking big. We are here to support our PES members.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPE.2023.3288586
Date of current version: 21 August 2023
1540-7977/23©2023IEEE