November Letter from the Chair

Thanks to all who made it to last month’s IEEE meeting at Barclay’s. Adeeb Hamzey of Virginia Power (and a friend and colleague from the IEEE Richmond section) gave a very interesting talk about the past two decades of electrical generation and transmission in Virginia. His experience in this field lent insight into the improvements that have been made, but also the issues that face the industry: attracting, developing and retaining electrical engineering talent, developing new generation sources to keep up with growing demand, and installing transmission lines to move the power around the state, to name a few. We are very appreciative of Adeeb, who took the time to answer numerous questions from the group during his presentation.
Next month we host Bernie Wright of General Electric, who will discuss issues of selective coordination. I will refer you to the meeting abstract for more information on the topic, but suffice it to say that this topic will be of great interest to power engineers to whom the increased requirements of the 2008 National Electric Code present a growing challenge for building electrical system design. General Electric obviously provides electrical equipment that can be used to meet these new requirements, but understanding the specifics of how an uncoordinated electrical system can create power disruption problems (and unhappy building occupants) is something that all members of IEEE should appreciate. Engineers must design safe electrical systems, but the new selective coordination requirements go much further to require greater service reliability at significant additional cost.
We meet this month in the Clark-Nexsen conference room, a new venue to IEEE-Hampton Roads. Please note that we will be serving pizza and charging $5 for members/non-members but admitting IEEE student members for free! It is important that you RSVP for this meeting as we will be ordering the food ahead of time. If you are an IEEE student member please provide your IEEE member # - if you cannot locate your number you may email any officer who can utilize SamIEEE to obtain this information.
Our November meeting brings us to officer elections for 2008. I greatly appreciate the assistance of James, Jim and Giuliano in their efforts as Vice-Chair, Treasurer and Secretary throughout the year; we would not have been as successful without their diligence and hard work. If you would like to be considered for a position, or would like to nominate an IEEE member for an officer positions, please do so at the November meeting. We will open the floor to nominees and conduct the election at the meeting, as this will be our last section-wide technical meeting for 2008. The opportunity is a tremendous one, and need not take up too much of your time (I know we are all busy). Please consider volunteering or nominating another IEEE member, and if you have any questions feel free to contact me.
Upcoming meetings:

• IEEE-HR monthly technical meeting November 20th at Clark-Nexsen
• IEEE-HR Executive Committee meeting December 11th
• IEEE-HR monthly technical meeting January 22nd Annual Student Paper Competition
• IEEE-HR monthly technical meeting February 19th
• IEEE-HR monthly technical meeting March 19th

This month’s meeting will conclude our Fall 2008 technical program. I hope you are finding the meetings interesting and valuable to your career and continued pursuit of knowledge in the electrical/electronics field. For those who are licensed engineers, we know you are thinking about the required Professional Development Hours and have plans to help you gain (and document!) these in 2009 when the state board is expected to roll out the new requirements. We continue to consider starting a Power & Energy (formerly Power Engineering) chapter, which would allow us to offer more focused presentations of several hours in duration to meet these requirements. For those of you in the communications and electro-optics field, we are also considering a Computer Society chapter and Dr. Dharamsi continues his good efforts in our local LEOS (laser and electro-optic society) chapter. IEEE societies present an avenue to provide greater depth and detail on technical presentations than we could possibly achieve in our monthly 1-hour meetings, and I encourage you to express interest if you would like to assist in these. In the meantime, we will continue to seek out interesting and varied technical topics for our regular section meetings. If you have a suggested topic or speaker (or might want to present something yourself) please speak with me or any IEEE officer about this. I look forward to seeing you November!
Regards,
Kurt Clemente, PE
2008 Chair
Hampton Roads Section

kurt.clemente@ieee.org