Louie Powell, P.E.

Louie Powell, P.E., was initially employed as a cooperative student by Reynolds, Smith & Hills, A&E, in Jacksonville, FL where he was engaged in power plant and electrical substation design. After completion of his BEE degree at Georgia Institute of Technology, he joined General Electric Company in January 1969. He was assigned to GE sales office in Chicago for one year as a metals industry requisition engineer, after which he was transferred to Schenectady, NY where he joined the Industrial Power Systems Engineering Operation (IPSEO). He advanced through various assignments with that group, culminating as Manager of IPSEO. In 1994 IPSEO was merged with the electric-utility focused Power Systems Engineering Department. He continued to be involved in various aspects of consulting, advancing to the position of Manager, Transmission & Distribution Consulting, from which he retired in 2004.

During his period at GE, Mr. Powell was engaged in a wide variety of consulting assignments including design of transmission and distribution facilities for oil gathering operations in Sumatra and Libya, design of a Greenfield plastics manufacturing facility, design of automotive manufacturing facilities in Tennessee and China, design of the grid interconnection for the NASA MOD-1 wind turbine demonstrator project as well as several small hydroelectric generation projects, design and consulting on the development of a transmission system for the country of Belize, consulting with the Consolidated Edison Company of New York on the development of a 25 year master plan for underground networks in New York City, task manager on the US Department of Energy PEDS-19 project to explore the impact of distributed storage and generation on distribution protection practices, a strategic assessment of the impact of the Change of Years Digits (Y2K) on energy reliability for GE Plastics, and a special assignment as Interim Transmission and Substations Engineering Director for the Commonwealth Edison Company of Chicago.

Mr. Powell held an appointment as Adjunct Professor in the Center for Electric Power Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) from 1978-1982 where he taught a graduate course on power system protective relaying. He also was on the faculty for GE’s Power Design Concept Seminar from 1978 – 1986, and GE’s Power System Engineering Course from 1994 - 2002.

An author of more than 40 technical papers, Mr. Powell was elected Fellow of IEEE in 1995. He received the Richard Harold Kauffmann Technical Field Award from IEEE in 2001, and is currently Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Industry Applications Magazine. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the States of New York, New Jersey and Louisiana.