Sustainable Energy Systems and Opportunities for Power Electronics

Energy sustainability and sustainable energy systems are the basis of long-term sustenance of human existence, advancement, and prosperity, social equity and mobility, energy security and surety, and environmental sustenance. It is, therefore, incumbent on us – the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) – to play its part in making an attempt to explore, propose, pursue, and validate ideas that attempt to at least partly address and resolve these grand challenges using plurality of pathways ranging from component-level innovations to system-of-systems solutions that address plurality of issues ranging from economy of scale, universality, environmental compatibility, compactness and portability, energy surety and security to enhanced energy-conversion efficiency and efficacy. Overall, the main objective of this Special Session, championed by IEEE PELS Technical Committee on Sustainable Energy Systems (TC5), is to bring together the latest developments in inventions, innovations, and applications of power electronics for sustainable energy systems and energy sustainability. In that context, a further goal is to bring together leaders and experts in related areas to share their vision and expertise with the broad ECCE’19 audience. The goal is to have a series of invited presentations and intersperse them at regular intervals with questions from the target audience to create an engaging and exciting session.

Session Chair:

Sudip K. Mazumder is the Director of Laboratory for Energy and Switching-Electronics Systems (LESES) and a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He has over 25 years of professional experience and has held R&D and design positions in leading industrial organizations and has served as Technical Consultant for several industries. He also serves as the President of NextWatt LLC. He is an IEEE Fellow. Currently, he serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE Power Electronics Society. Since 2019, he also serves as the Editor-at-Large for IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. He is also the current Chair for the IEEE PELS Technical Committee on Sustainable Energy Systems and a Chair for IEEE PEDG 2021.

Speakers:

Isik C. Kizilyalli, ARPA-E

Anil Pahwa, NSF

Lynn Petersen, ONR

Kerry Cheung, DOE

Vladimir Blasko, UTRC

Liuchen Chang, University of New Brunswick

Dehong (Mark) Xu, Zhejiang University, China

Sudip K Mazumder, Juan Balda, and Wei Qiao, University of Illinois, University of Arkansas, and University of Nebraska