Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented for the Abel averages of discrete and strongly continuous semigroups, $T^k$ and $T_t$, to be power convergent in the operator norm in a complex Banach space. These results cover also the case where $T
$ is unbounded and the corresponding Abel average is defined by means of the resolvent of $T$. They complement the classical results by Michael Lin establishing sufficient conditions for the corresponding convergence for a bounded $T$.
