Technical Program – November 8th to November 10th 2021
Be aware of the time change on November 7th, from Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) to Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Monday, November 8th 2021 |

Eastern Standard Time (EST) | |||
10:30 am – 11:00 am | Opening Remarks from the Conference Chairs | Marco Liserre and Jianhui Wang | |
11:00 am – 1:00 pm | Workshop on microgrids | Xiaonan Lu and Marco Liserre | |
1:00 pm | Adjourn |
Workshop on microgrids organized by Xiaonan Lu, Temple University, USA, in cooperation with the Technical Committee 8 of IEEE PELS
Tuesday, November 9th 2021 |

Eastern Standard Time (EST) | |||
8:30 am – 8:45 am | Keynote VP FP&L NextEra | Solar and Wind as emerging leaders | Matt Valle |
8:45 am – 10:15 am | Plenary Panel I | Learning of the Texas Blackout | Don, et al |
10:15 am – 10:30 am | Morning Break | ||
10:30 am – 12:00 pm | Invited Session I | Grid resiliency in power electronics dominated grid | Marco, R. Zhang (zhangr@vt.edu) |
12:00 pm – 12:45 pm | Lunch Break | ||
12:45 pm – 2:15 pm | Plenary Panel II | Power Converter Technologies | Vijay, Enslin |
2:15 pm – 2:30 pm | Afternoon Break | ||
2:30 pm – 4:00 pm | Invited Session II | Power converter modelling in power systems | C. Vournas, M. Liserre |
4:00 pm | Adjourn |
Keynote
Matt Valle, Vice President, NextEra, “The Growth of PV as the leader in renewable resources vis-e-vis Wind and other as well FPL/NextEra as world’s leader in renewables”
Plenary Panel I: Learning of the Texas Blackout
- Tom Coleman, Chief Technical Adviser, NERC, “The Changing Resource Mix, Extreme Natural Events, and Critical Infrastructure Interdependencies – How these emerging risks contributed to the wide scale outages in ERCOT, SPP, and MISO during the February 2021 Cold Weather event”
- Mark McGranaghan, Vice President, EPRI, “Resource Adequacy Lessons Learned and Future Requirements in a Decarbonized Future”
- Damir Novosel, President, Quanta Technologies, “Issues and Solutions in Achieving Electrical Power Delivery Resilience”
- Le Xie (Professor, TAMU) and Hao Zhu (Assistant Professor, UT Austin), “An Open-access Cross-domain Approach to Analyzing the Impact of Extreme Events on the Electricity Sector: What We Learned from COVID-19 and 2021 Texas Winter Outage”
Invited Session I: Grid Resiliency in power electronics dominated grid
- Ryan Quint, Senior Manager, NERC, “Bulk Power System Reliability Perspectives for Integrating Inverter-Based Technologies”
- Vahan Gervorgian, NREL , “Black start and resiliency services”
- Deepak Ramasubramanian & Bruno Leonardi, EPRI, “DER and HVDC solutions in a power electronics future power system”
- Jan Svensson, Hitachi Energy, “BESS to add grid services and increase performance of offshore wind power plants”
Plenary Panel II: Power Converter Technologies
- Ben Kroposki, NREL, “Renewable Integration and the Increased use of Inverter Based Resources in Power Grids”
- Ram Adapa, EPRI, “HVDC & FACTS (Flexible AC Transmission Systems) including Wide Band Gap power electronics applications”
- Leo Casey, Google X, “Converter technology for up to 100% converter-based Generation”
- Aleks Vukojevic, ComEd, “Converter structure and protection in partial MicroGrids”
Invited Session II Power Converter modelling in power systems
- Thierry van Cutsem, University of Liege, Belgium and Xavier Guilland, University of Lille, France “Stability of a future transmission grid with a high penetration of power electronic converters”
- Vijay Vittal, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, “New developments in the WECC modeling group for converter modeling in transient stability studies”
- Antonello Monti, RWTH Aachen, Germany “Simulation Methods for Transients in Low Inertia Power Systems”
- Trevor Gaunt, University of Cape Town, South Africa, “Basic definition of active and apparent power and power factor in unbalanced, distorted systems”
Wednesday, November 10th 2021 |

Eastern Standard Time (EST) | |||
8:30 am – 10:30 am | Plenary Panel III | Inverter-Based Protection & Standards | J. Enslin, X. Wang |
10:30 am – 10:45 am | Morning Break | ||
10:45 am – 12:15 pm | Invited Session III | Towards 100% Renewable Penetration | K. Sun |
12:15 pm | Conference Adjourn |
Plenary Panel III: Inverter-Based Protection and Standards
- Sakis Meliopoulos, GeorgiaTech, USA, “Protection and Control of systems with High penetration of IBRs via Dynamic State Estimation”
- Barry Mather, NREL, “Impact of IEEE 1547-2018 Inverter Performance Categories on Grid Performance/Protection”
- Farid Katiraei, Quanta Services, “Grid forming Inverter Performance – A comparison case of protection and controls with grid-tie inverters”
- Sukumar Brahma, Clemson University, “Operation and Protection of Microgrids with High Penetration of IBRs”
Invited Session III: Towards 100% Renewable Penetration
- Changyong Wang, Delta Electronics, “The role of energy storage in carbon-free society”
- Igor Cvetkovic, Virginia Tech, “Modeling of power electronics for system-level analyses and stability studies”
- Sanjib Kumar Panda, National University of Singapore, “Matrix-based single-stage isolated AC-DC bidirectional converters for PV and battery integration with the medium-voltage utility grid”
- Rae-Young (Ryan) Kim, Hanyang University, “Advanced DC-DC converters for distributed energy storage systems”