October Letter from the Chair

Power Engineering with Adeeb Hamzey, Virginia Dominion Power

Thanks to all who made it to last month’s IEEE meeting at Aberdeen Barn. We were fortunate to have Dr. Aftab Ahmad of Norfolk State University describe the difficulty in assessing network security and the manner in which a ITU framework can be used to begin to quantify how secure a network can be made. I was pleased to see a strong turnout from NSU and TCC, and welcome participation from all local student chapters. IEEE Hampton Roads continues our fall technical presentation series this month with Adeeb Hamzey of Virginia Power’s Richmond office. Adeeb is a past chair of IEEE-Richmond, and has over 28 years experience in electric utilities. He has observed first-hand many changes in his field, from a fully-government-regulated utility through stages of deregulation to today’s re-regulated existence. It should be interesting to hear the trends and opportunities from the point of view of a company facing unprecedented challenges in the areas of renewable energy, potential taxes on carbon from power generation and the impending shift in electric consumption habits as plug-in hybrid cars move from aftermarket kits to dealer models in 2009. Our alternating-location meeting policy takes us to the peninsula this month. We will meet at Barclay’s Bistro, a new location due to the demise of the Steak-and-Ale which we enjoyed very much. We anticipate a sizeable turnout for this exciting meeting, and have arranged a slightly larger meeting space but it is still important to RSVP prior to the meeting. Note that we return to our regular “3rd Thursday” meeting date after last month’s change.
We will be trying out an interesting change the following month, when a local business will host our meeting in their conference center. Dinner will consist of pizza, allowing us to drastically lower the price to $5 – and free for IEEE student members! The plan is for this to be a one-off arrangement, as our January student paper competition is normally a more formal dinner at a local university, if you feel the low price justifies the shift from a sit-down dinner to pizza we may try this again or make it a regular occurrence. Your feedback is welcome on this, so please email any officer with your thoughts.
Upcoming meetings:

• IEEE-HR monthly technical meeting Oct 16th Adeeb Hamzey (Virginia Power) “Power Engineering”
• IEEE-HR monthly technical meeting Nov 20th
• IEEE-HR Executive Committee meeting December 11th
• IEEE-HR monthly technical meeting January 22nd Annual Student Paper Competition

We look forward to seeing you at our Fall 2008 technical programs, and hope you find them interesting and valuable. While IEEE-HR certainly “dabbles” into various technical topics to permit all of our members to learn about the many fields that constitute Electrical and Electronic Engineering, we do have one local technical society (IEEE LEOS Laser and Electro-Optical Society) and strong interest to start two additional societies (IEEE-CS Communications Society and IEEEPES Power and Energy Society). These societies permit more focused members with expertise in a particular field. If you are currently subscribe to IEEE-CS or IEEE-PES through your IEEE membership, we are studying to determine if we have the local interest and the minimum number of subscribing society members to start and sustain local chapters. One of the benefits of an IEEE society chapter at our local IEEE section is that this would open doors to IEEE distinguished lecturers from these fields, typically experts in these fields from around the country. The national IEEE societies offer a lot of support to local society chapters, and we would greatly benefit from this if sufficient interest exists to sustain meeting. As always, 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 October!
Regards,
Kurt J. Clemente, PE
2007 Chair
Hampton Roads Section
kurt.clemente@ieee.org