Over the last decade the telecommunications and information technology demand has grown exponentially. At the same time the demand for the energy has been significantly increased which led d the electric utilities, oil and gas companies, and other critical infrastructure organizations to deploy and to integrate their industries with IT and telecom strategies in order to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and strengthen the information backbones within their corporations. The energy and utility companies started to capitalize on continuing IT innovations to tackle  deal with the importance of implementing improved security measures into IT and telecom strategies in order to protect the data integrity and ensure the reliability of utility and energy telecom systems.  The continuous challenges for these two technologies is to map, model, manage and maintain their distributed facilities and networks optimally to meet new customer expectations and industry compliances.

Building on Ottawa’s prominent position in the high technology, telecommunications and renewable energy sectors, this Electrical Power Symposium 2005 (EPS2005) aims to identify the emerging opportunities for the convergence of power and high technologies. The EPS2005 theme is Converging Power and High Technologies in order to fill the gap between the telecom/high tech and utilities and to make the two technologies working together and fully integrated.
 
In Ontario, and many other jurisdictions around the world, the Central Station model is failing to deliver electricity in a financially sound manner. Whilst demand continues to grow, generation growth is constrained and debt is rampant. The best hydro sites have been utilized, oil and gas have supply limitations, coal has environmental issues, and nuclear generation has multiple concerns such as high cost, terrorism threat and waste.