UTC hosts second POWA Conference as power industry explores grid reliability

A large audience attends a Point on Wave Applications Conference presentation in a UTC event room. A screen displays a slide titled “AI-Powered Pattern Matching and Automated Fault Analysis.”

The 2026 POWA Conference brought representatives more than 50 organizations to the UTC campus. Photo courtesy of Carlie Mahaffey Photography.

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga hosted the second Point On Wave Applications (POWA) Conference on Sept. 29-30, bringing more than three times as many participants as the inaugural event and reinforcing the growing interest in using high-resolution electrical data to strengthen the power grid.

More than 50 organizations were represented at the two-day conference, held at the Wolford Family Athletic Center on the UTC campus. Utilities, national laboratories, universities, consultants and technology companies gathered to discuss how point-on-wave data can support the planning, operation, maintenance, reliability and security of power generation, transmission and distribution systems.

Point-on-wave data captures detailed waveform information from the electric grid. This information can help utilities and other power-system operators identify problems, understand equipment and system behavior, and make better-informed decisions.

“There’s a lot of good work in this space being done, not just in academia, but across the industry and across utilities. It was shared here,” said Dr. Don Reising, Guerry and UC Foundation professor of electrical engineering at UTC. “We all can learn from this and take those lessons and apply them to our own areas to improve the power systems, operations, reliability and security.”

Reising, a member of the UTC faculty since 2014, helped organize the inaugural conference with Christoph Lackner of the Grid Protection Alliance and Theo Laughner and Laurie Okun of LifeScale Analytics. The idea grew from a shared belief that the power industry needed a conference dedicated to point-on-wave applications.

“We didn’t have one. This did not exist in the power systems industry,” Reising said of the conference’s early development.

The first POWA Conference, held at UTC in 2025, drew more than 70 engineers, managers, academics, vendors and industry experts. Reising said attendance this year more than tripled as interest in waveform data and its potential uses continues to grow.

The 2026 program included technical sessions and workshops covering fault analysis, power-quality cases, sensors and measurements, waveform analytics, utility standards, power-electronic switching, oscillation analysis, and applications involving power quality and data centers.

Keynote speakers included Alex McEachern, CEO of McEachern Laboratories Inc.; David Nordy, director of energy solutions at EPB; Dr. Jean Mahseredjian, a professor at Polytechnique Montréal; and Tony Ranson, CEO of Mehta Tech.

Dr. Kumar Yelamarthi, dean of the UTC College of Engineering and Computer Science, provided welcome remarks.

“Hosting the POWA Conference positions UTC as a trusted partner for the power industry, bringing together utilities, researchers, technology companies and educators to address challenges that affect the reliability and security of the electric grid,” Yelamarthi said. “For the College of Engineering and Computer Science, it reflects the strength of our electrical engineering program and our longstanding relationships with industry. It also offers our college the opportunity to engage directly with leaders whose work is shaping the systems that deliver power to communities across the region and beyond.”

For Reising, the conference’s value lies in turning data into useful knowledge.

“It’s information, and it’s not any good if you don’t use it and learn from it,” he said. “If people aren’t looking at it, there’s a lot of information that you’re not making available to yourself.”

Reising said the long-term opportunity is to use waveform data to improve the grid’s security and reliability. As organizations learn from the data, artificial intelligence and machine learning could play a larger role in turning it into operational support.

UTC’s involvement reflects its established relationships across the power industry, Reising said. The Department of Electrical Engineering has a strong power systems focus in its curriculum, and organizations—including TVA, EPB, the Electric Power Research Institute and Schneider Electric—have worked with UTC through hiring, internships, teaching and laboratory support.

“That has led to successful funding and successful transition of technologies,” Reising said. “I think it just made sense that UTC be involved.”

Chattanooga also offered a convenient regional setting, with most attendees coming from across Tennessee and nearby states. Reising said the mix of organizations and participants was among the event’s strengths. Eight universities and several national laboratories were represented, along with utilities and companies serving the power sector.

The conference included a student poster competition and opportunities for UTC students to help with event operations.

Reising said he wants to expand student participation in future conferences, not only through posters and presentations but also via conversations.

“There are so many people from industry and utilities,” he said, noting that connections can lead to internships and jobs after graduation.

Growth from Year One to Year Two reflected greater effort behind the event. Reising said the four-person committee that organized the first conference expanded this year with participants from numerous organizations, including APP Engineering, Dalton State College, Electric Power Research Institute, EPB, Grid Protection Alliance, LifeScale Analytics, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, Texas A&M University, UT Knoxville and TVA.

“We couldn’t have done it without the committee that we ended up forming,” Reising said. “Not just getting more people involved, but getting the right people involved.”

Sponsors of the 2026 POWA Conference included Ametek Power Instruments, APP Engineering, Electric Power Research Institute, Elspec, EPB, Grid Protection Alliance, Mehta Tech Inc., Pfiffner Moser Glaser Haefely Haveco, Powerside, Satec, Schneider Electric, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories and Siemens.