Over 1.1 Billion people live with absolutely no access to electricity. At the same time, millions of people who normally enjoy a better life and energy access, find themselves, through war, climate change or increasingly frequent catastrophic HILF (High Impact Low Frequency) events, in a situation where the existing energy infrastructure is essentially destroyed. In both cases, the quality of life of more than a billion people is affected and it is clear that to build a new energy infrastructure for these deprived people and communities is a critical priority. A fundamental question facing us today is – ‘what should this new energy infrastructure look like?’.

Should we continue with a 20^th century centralized paradigm that was designed in a time when only mechanical solutions were available, or should it be reimagined with fast-moving 21^st century technology with exponentially-declining prices, such as distributed generation, prosumers, dynamic pricing, microgrids, energy storage, internet of things, communications, cloud computing, and others? The two seemingly disparate problems in energy access provide a unique opportunity to define what such a new electricity infrastructure could look like, to develop components needed to realize such a dynamically reconfigurable system and to demonstrate using test beds and real deployments, the ability for a decentralized energy infrastructure to be viable. Energy access provides perhaps the best path to fulfill the IEEE mission statement: Advancing Technology for Humanity.

Join us for the first IEEE DEAS workshop that will include invited papers, tutorials, and technical papers for presentation in regular and poster sessions, an exposition, where companies and organizations involved in energy access will be participating. The digests will undergo a standard IEEE PELS peer review process. Accepted papers that are presented at a regular or poster sessions will also be uploaded to IEEE Explore and will be eligible for submission to all IEEE PELS and IEEE PES journals and transactions. The workshop will have two separate tracks; Energy Access Solutions and Resilient Energy Infrastructure.

This call for papers also serves as an invitation for proposals to present tutorials on related topics. Tutorial presenters will get one free registration for the workshop and will receive a small honorarium.