The 49th North American Power Symposium will be hosted by West Virginia University.  NAPS has been a very active symposium since its inception in 1969 as the Midwest Power Symposium and later renamed as North American Power Symposium in 1986. NAPS is held every year at a different university in North America and provides an open forum for participants from academia and industry to exchange innovative ideas and solutions. NAPS will continue the long-held tradition of encouraging student-presented papers and recognizing student best efforts by awards to be presented at the end of the symposium. NAPS welcomes papers on analytical, computational, experimental studies aimed at solving problems related to optimized operation, real time and near real time control, monitoring and data collection, protection with and without distributed generations, reliability as well as economics of power and energy systems along with recent trends in connected and smart cities, DC grids and microgrids with its components.