Where the meeting has been
PSR has held user meetings since 2004, to bring people from the energy sector together and share what's new in our analytical tools. That makes seven editions so far. The first had forty people in Rio. Recent ones have drawn participants from twenty countries on four continents.
The next meeting goes to the Amazon, to Manaus on the Rio Negro. Five days of sessions, training and user presentations, ending with a field day on the river.
Six days on the Paraná, built around the growing complexity of power systems and what artificial intelligence changes in analytical work. Sessions covered transmission and grid-aware planning, and data centres as a new planning problem. There was also a technical visit to Itaipu and a group trip to the falls.
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Just over a year after Panama, the meeting came back to Brazil, to the coastal town of Búzios. After ELAU went well, it was renamed the PSR User Meeting and became a yearly event. People came from twenty countries on four continents. The agenda covered the energy transition with new carriers such as hydrogen, bringing the effects of climate change into planning with probabilistic models, and the role transmission plays in a decarbonised system.
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After twelve years without one, the meeting came back, again in Panama City, under the name ELAU (the Latin American User Meeting). This edition focused on planning the operation and expansion of systems with a high share of renewables: how to represent and model renewable sources, real case studies, storage, flexibility needs in the transition, hydrology, flows and climate variables, and integrated generation and transmission planning. PSR also showed its recent tools, applications and ways of visualising results. There were ninety-five registrants from fifteen countries and more than forty companies, which was enough to decide not to wait another decade for the next one.
Four years later the meeting went to Panama City. Around a hundred people came from across Latin America, which showed the meetings were worth having, both to learn and to get to know other people who use the tools every day.
The second user meeting was back in Rio de Janeiro, with more than fifty people this time. Besides SDDP and OptGen, it introduced new products: NCP, NetPlan, Coral, ePSR and PSR Cloud. It also added user presentations on how people were applying the tools, which made the meeting much more interactive.
The first user meeting, in Rio de Janeiro, brought together about forty people from across Latin America, mostly to go through SDDP and OptGen and discuss how they worked. It set the pattern every edition has followed since: developers, users and the PSR support team in the same room.
