2026 Event Schedule

Modern blackouts no longer unfold at human speed—they now cascade at machine speed.
A comparative analysis of major outages across the United States, Spain, Italy, and Latin America reveals a 300-fold acceleration in grid failure dynamics over the past two decades. What once evolved across minutes now collapses inside 5-second windows, exceeding human reaction limits and redefining the very foundations of protection, automation, and grid communications.

In this session, Marco Pangos, Director of Business Development at Ubiik and IEEE Life Senior Member, presents the results of his comprehensive blackout research, connecting the physics of ultra-fast grid instability with America’s most urgent grid modernization priorities—digital substations (IEC 61850), Private LTE, AI-enabled control rooms, DER volatility, and data-center-driven load acceleration.

Using real-world blackout case studies—from the 2003 Italian system failure to today’s ultra-fast cascading grid events—this presentation exposes a growing and dangerous mismatch between modern grid behavior and legacy OT communications performance.

Attendees will gain practical, action-oriented insight into next-generation protection coordination communication requirements, understand why deterministic low-latency networks are now a national reliability necessity—not a design preference, and learn how U.S. utilities can proactively prevent billion-dollar cascading failures in an era of AI-driven operations, inverter-dominated grids, and extreme system stress.

Session Sponsored by Ubiik