UPEC Conference - An introduction

This year so far has been full of adventures and excitement, not least in that I have so far had two papers accepted for conferences and am awaiting acceptance on two more. The subject of this post and one or two more posts which I shall be putting up soon are the first conference where a paper of mine was accepted and which I was fortunate enough to attend and present my paper and another two papers from UCT on behalf of other students. The conference I am referencing is the UPEC conference of 2010. If you would like more information on the conference than what I write you can see more on the conference website: UPEC website.

UPEC is short of the Universities' Power Engineering Conference. This is an international conference which is now in its 45th year and which has become widely recognised and draws attendees from around the world.
I had the pleasure of meeting delegates from many areas in the UK, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, China, Germany, Ethiopia, Japan, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia and various other countries.

The main hall of Cardiff University

The conference was held in Cardiff, Wales this year at the University of Cardiff. The picture on the left is one that I took of the main hall at Cardiff University.

The title of the paper that I wrote and presented is entitled: The Importance of Energy Storage in Renewable Power Generation: A Review and will be published along with the conference proceeding in the IEEE library. In addition to this paper I presented a paper entitled: Prospects of Landfill Energy in Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa and its Impacts written by Wilfried Nguz, a colleague of mine, and second authored by myself and lastly presented a paper entitled: Value-Based Operational Strategy of CHP-Based Microgrid: A Comparative Analysis written by A. Basu, a colleague in India.

The Cape Town Contingent

The contingent from Cape Town included a Namibian MSc Student from the University of Stellenbosch, two Senior lecturers from the University of Cape Town, including my co-supervisor, a Professor from the UCT, a PhD student from the University of Mombasa currently studying at UCT and myself. Between the six of us, we presented the 16 papers accepted from UCT.

The conference was held over 4 days beginning with a day of tutorials. The topic of the tutorials for this conference was Off-shore Windfarms and people from industry as well as academics lectured during these tutorial sessions, giving large amounts of insight. The rest of the conference was split into parallel sessions where papers were presented by the authors of the papers and a chance for discussion of each paper was given, as is the typical layout for conferences. Thus ends this first post on the UPEC conference. In the next couple of posts, I will flesh out the interesting bits of what I learnt, who I met and ideas which came up during this time.