Keynote panelists are introduced at the first POWA Conference. Photo by Clara Paulson.
The first Point On Wave Applications (POWA) Conference brought more than 70 engineers, managers, academics, vendors and industry experts from across the power industry to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus on Oct. 7-8.
Held at the Wolford Family Athletic Center, the two-day event focused on how point-on-wave data is being applied in the planning, operation and maintenance of power generation, transmission and distribution systems.
The POWA conference featured 12 technical presentations, a keynote panel and workshops led by Grid Protection Alliance (GPA), Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), Vaisala, PingThings and Mehta Tech Inc. Sponsors included APP Engineering, EPB, Mehta Tech, SEL, Lifescale Analytics and GPA.
Workshops during the conference offered hands-on tutorials in the use of vendor tools to measure, collect, manage and analyze point-on-wave data.
Dr. Don Reising, Guerry and UC Foundation professor of electrical engineering at UTC, served as the lead organizer, along with Christoph Lackner of GPA and Theo Laughner and Lauri Okun of Lifescale Analytics.
The keynote session, “Perspectives on the Importance of POWA for the Utility Industry,” brought together leading voices from policy, research and applied technology to discuss how high-fidelity grid data is reshaping utility operations and reliability. The keynote panelists included:
- Bruce Walker, former assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity, who discussed the role of data in national grid modernization and reliability.
- Dr. Bill Howe, director of data science at the Electric Power Research Institute, who focused on operationalizing point-on-wave data at scale and improving interoperability.
- Dr. Hamed Mohsenian-Rad, professor of electrical engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who shared research on smart grid sensors, data analytics and system protection.
- Jim Glass, assistant vice president of smart grid operations at EPB, who provided a utility-side view of how high-resolution data improves reliability and reduces outages.
- Dr. Ellery Blood of SEL, who discussed advances in digital power system innovation and the use of point-on-wave data for system protection and automation.
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UTC College of Engineering and Computer Science
Photos by Clara Paulson
