At Raleigh Convention Center during the Conference Program
We know how much our participants enjoy a good conversation about what is going on within utilities and their experiences. This year, we are offering the following panels which cover a variety of topics and utility panelists. Can’t wait to hear the conversations! See the conference schedule for the exact timing.
Each panel listed below has a description about the topic with the panelists and moderator. Expand the ones that interest you.
The electrical power system is stressed by recent and expected load growth due to large data center growth (with inverter-based computational loads) and electrification of transportation, integration of inverter-based resources (IBRs), severe weather events (e.g., wildfires, hurricanes), and aging equipment & supply chain issues. Dynamic behavior and unwanted disconnections of inverter-based loads (IBLs) create significant risks for the electrical power system and require different ways of controlling and protecting the grid and close collaboration among generating entities and T&D owners and operators.
It is important to protect the electric grid against disturbances and protect essential data center loads in harmony with grid operations. Standardization of requirements and solutions, use of best practices, and added transparency to interconnecting IBRs and IBLs are necessary factors to build the grid of the future.
This panel will address technical issues and focus on protection and control issues and solutions, as well as how to leverage new technologies, including AI tools. It will share best practices to balance reliability, resilience, and affordability.
Moderator: Damir Novosel (DASH Power Partners)
Panelists:
Scott Bricker (PG&E)
Zheyuan Cheng (Danovo Energy Solutions)
Glenn Wilson (Southern Company)
With the acceleration of capital projects (new substations and upgrading existing substations), it is increasingly important to look at how to deploy digital substations. Digital substations provide improvements in protection, control, design, compliance, and testing cycles. However, there are many actions that a utility must do to pave the path to digitization that will make the journey successful and sustainable. The panelists will provide real-world experiences in how utilities approach this process. They will touch on the challenges, justification, standards, proof of concept and testing, commissioning, training and more. The goal is to give utilities that are just beginning the digitization of substations process, some valuable information to make the journey more effective and efficient. Various topics:
- Utility applications
- Challenges in adopting digital substations and change management
- Budgeting hurdles
- Drivers
- Internal resources and knowledge transfer
- Technology
- 61850, Centralized, and virtual PAC systems
Moderator: Jonathan Sykes (Danovo)
Participants:
Brant Heap (SRP)
Glenn Wilson (SoCo)
Shashank Bodhankar (PG&E)
Description: The session brings together utility engineers who have commissioned IEC 61850 substations and can speak directly to the realities of modern digital substation deployment. Panelists will share insights from their own implementations—covering site topology, multi vendor integration, and the practical use of GOOSE, MMS, and Sampled Values—before engaging in a deep technical discussion on commissioning challenges. Topics include PTP time synchronization performance, effective methods for Sampled Values testing, the role of simulation mode in validating GOOSE schemes, differences encountered during SCADA commissioning under MMS, and the specialized tools that proved most valuable in the field. Attendees will gain grounded, experience based lessons learned to strengthen their own 61850 commissioning practices.
Moderator: John Bettler (Johnny P&C, LLC)
Panelists:
Zeus Xioco (Tesco Automation)
Jonathan Doroh (Southern Companies)
Modern power systems are producing unprecedented volumes of high-resolution data from phasor measurement units, power quality monitors, digital relays, fault recorders, intelligent electronic devices, and other grid sensors. While this data has significant potential value, moving and storing all raw measurements centrally is often costly, inefficient, and difficult to scale. This panel will explore emerging monitoring architectures that push computation closer to the source of data, enabling analytics at the substation, feeder, device, or edge-computing layer. The discussion will focus on how utilities and technology providers can extract actionable information locally while minimizing communication bandwidth and long-term storage requirements. Rather than continuously transporting massive streams of raw data, these architectures can transmit processed insights, event summaries, health indicators, signatures, alarms, and selected windows of raw data associated with detected conditions. Panelists will discuss practical use cases involving PMU, PQ, and other sensor data, including event detection, disturbance characterization, asset monitoring, situational awareness, and operational decision support. The session will also address key implementation considerations such as data quality, interoperability, cybersecurity, latency, model deployment, validation, and the balance between centralized analytics and distributed intelligence. The goal is to highlight how advanced analytics can transform monitoring data into measurable operational value.
Moderator: David Hart (Danovo Energy Solutions)
Panelists:
Jim Follum (PNNL)
Jared Bestebreur (SEL)
Kat Sico (Duke Energy)
