2025 IEEE Power & Energy Society Summit: achieving a more reliable and resilient energy future
I attended the IEEE Summit May 19-21, 2025, in San Jose, CA. There were more than 300 attendees from more than 150 organizations.
The inaugural summit focused on practical experiences by the power and energy industry to achieve a more reliable and resilient electric power grid and efforts to drive for reliability performance through outage reduction and quicker response. The summit included system level thinking to mitigate against high impact low probability or resilience events. The program can be found here.
The key takeaways were:
- This was an engineering conference with the attendees being engineers from utilities, industry, universities, regulators and national laboratories including utility executives. Because this was an engineering conference, there was no mention of the term “operational technology-OT” as that is a cybersecurity term.
- Cybersecurity was assumed to be a data issue and therefore not critical to a reliable and resilient grid. Consequently, there were no cybersecurity sessions, and no cybersecurity companies exhibited.
- All questions about cybersecurity were referred to the utilities or vendors IT organizations.
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It was evident that engineering and cybersecurity organizations are not coordinating. It was also evident the network security organizations may not be aware of the engineering needs for modern resilient and reliable grids. Yet, it is not possible for the grid to be reliable and resilient without also being cybersecure. Hopefully, cybersecurity will be included in future conferences.
