Jun 30, 2024
IEEE traces its roots back to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and was originally founded in 1884
As this post is being written, we are about a month removed from the 2024 IEEE PES T&D Conference and Exposition. This year's conference was held in Anaheim from May 6-9. We will meet again in 2026 in Chicago.
If you'd like to know more about the conference and what we gleaned from it, we published another post reflecting on our own presentation – what it takes to succeed as a Engineer of Choice (EOC) partner with a major American utility – and why the bi-annual conferences are so important to Commonwealth.
In this post, we want to discuss some of the highlights from this year's event. Before we get to them, a few comments on the IEEE and PES are in order.
More Than a Century of Expertise
As explained in our previous post, the IEEE traces its roots back to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. That organization was originally founded in 1884. It merged with the Institute of Radio Engineers in 1963 to form what we now know as the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
The IEEE's Power & Energy Society (PES) is a group that operates within the larger IEEE. It was formerly known as the Power Engineering Society; today it is known by the acronym IEEE PES. Its main function is to act as a society that focuses on continuing to advance scientific and engineering knowledge relating to energy and electric power.
IEEE PES joins forces with T&D every two years to sponsor their conference and exposition. The bi-annual event is one of the most important on the calendar for power plant operators, energy distributors, and consulting firms like camp Commonwealth.
Highlights From 2024
The highlight for us was our presentation on succeeding as an Engineer of Choice. Commonwealth COO Matt Hales teamed up with engineer Jason Wallace and Leigh Ann King from American Electric Power (AEP) to discuss our partnership. However, our presentation was by no means the only thing worth attending.
Other presentations included:
A discussion of policy and regulation and how it will affect the power grid of the future.
An impressive presentation on transmission buildout, presented as a panel session by experts in the field.
Another panel discussion covering the topic of integrated planning for power customers.
There were additional sessions covering decarbonization, climate change and its impacts on the grid, trends in wildfire mitigation, the impacts of EV charging, and so much more. Attendees even had the opportunity to take advantage of educational offerings.
For example, attending certain panel sessions could not lead to earning a PDH certificate while attending targeted tutorials and IEEE Plain Talk sessions opened the door to CEU certification. That alone was worth the price of admission for scores of attendees.
Looking Forward to 2026
At the end of it all, the Commonwealth team left the 2024 IEEE PES T&D Conference and Exposition feeling like we always do after this phenomenal conference: full of a ton of new information we can't wait to pass along. Needless to say, we are looking forward to 2026 in Chicago.
We attend these types of conferences because they make us better at what we do. The information we glean informs us as we seek to serve our clients. More importantly, the vision we gained from others in our industry helps us see a bigger picture of power generation moving forward.
There is a lot for us to do in preparation for 2026. In the meantime, we will take what we learned from the 2024 conference and put it to work for our clients.
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