IEC Award 2024: Elias Ghannoum
2024 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of William Thomson, best known as Lord Kelvin; a great mind, who gave us not only the Kelvin temperature scale but also important insights between others in thermodynamics and in electricity.
President of CIGRE
Few people know that Lord Kelvin also initiated the creation of the IEC and was the founding President. Equally few remember that CIGRE was established in 1921 upon an incentive of IEC to prepare the engineering/scientific fundamentals upon which IEC standards are based. This concept has been proven to be very successful and is since then the cornerstone of the excellent cooperation between CIGRE and IEC.
All this has been reason enough for me to visit picturesque Edinburgh - called also "Athens of the North”- and attend the very interesting and extremely well-organized IEC General Meeting there. This event concluded on Friday, October 25th with the annual Lord Kelvin Award which was bestowed on a very well-known and accomplished CIGRE member, my good friend Elias Ghannoum. It is worth noting that this is the most prestigious IEC award, as only one recipient is selected each year among 30,000 experts from 170 countries.
At the IEC General Meeting with the Lord Kelvin Award recipient Elias Ghannoum (left)
(source)
I met Elias sometime in the 1980s and have been impressed by his strong personality and tremendous engineering knowledge in our common passion: overhead lines. I have also been impressed by his eloquent presentations in both English and French, during which Elias, being perfectly bilingual, switched back and forth between the two languages, creating havoc to the translation team (this was when live presentation translation was still en vogue in CIGRE).
Elias has had a remarkable career: After leading positions in Hydro-Quebec, he has very successfully worked as consultant helping utilities around the globe build safe and reliable overhead lines. This has been his great passion and through this he can be credited as one of the founders of probabilistic line design. As he recently wrote to me: “There is no doubt in my mind that my work with CIGRE where I developed the basic engineering concepts of some standards, particularly IEC 60826, have helped gaining acceptance in the IEC”, leading, so to say, to a perfect ‘marriage’ between CIGRE and IEC. This reminds me to mention that Elias was accompanied in Edinburgh by his wife Mona and their whole family, which gave to the very well-planned award ceremony an additional sentimental touch
This has also been an excellent opportunity to meet key IEC officials and discuss with them how to best strengthen and expand our cooperation in order to avoid duplications, when attracting skilled talent in our industry is becoming increasingly critical.
In conclusion, please join me in congratulating Elias once more, not only for this exceptional IEC achievement, but also for all his remarkable contributions to CIGRE.
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