Current Members

Chris Fate
Snohomish PUD

Mr. Fate has been with Snohomish County Public Utility District for 13 years. For the past four years he has assisted commercial and industrial customers with power quality and power factor correction. Previously Mr. Fate worked in System Protection and Relaying for Transmission and Distribution Departments. Mr. Fate graduated from the University of Idaho in 1986 with a B.S.E.E and is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Washington.

Joe Frani, P.E., CEM
Project Manager for Power Quality Engineering
San Diego Gas & Electric

Joe Frani received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Connecticut in 1973, an ATA in Energy Management in 1985, and a Masters in Business Administration from Antioch University in 1995.

Mr. Frani joined San Diego Gas & Electric in 2001 as a Project Manager. Previous to his sojourn south, Frani worked for Snohomish County Public Utility District, a Northwest water and electric utility, for seventeen years. While there he served in a variety of positions including Power Quality and Demand Side Engineer as well as management roles with Field Engineering, Demand Side Management, and Key Accounts groups. He has authored several papers and given numerous presentations on power quality and demand side management.

Mr. Frani is a founding member of the board of the Power Quality Service Center, a member of the IEEE Power Engineering and Industrial Applications Societies, and the Association of Energy Engineers. He is a registered professional engineer in the states of California, Oregon and Washington and a Certified Energy Manager.

James R. Harries
Bonneville Power Administration

James R. Harries is the Bonneville Power Administration Inductive Coordination and Power Quality Engineer. He is a registered Professional Engineer in Oregon and has a degree in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State University. He is a contributing member of the IEEE 519 Harmonic Application Guide committee. His professional career includes working for Alcoa Aluminum, Southern California Edison, and the Bonneville Power Administration. At BPA, Mr. Harries has worked as an electronic engineer, a test engineer, a planning engineer, Chief of Planning Methods, and presently as a senior high voltage engineer in the Substations section. Mr. Harries is a member of the Power Engineering Society, the Industrial Applications Society, and Pi Mu Epsilon.

Nelly Leap
Electrical Engineer
Bonneville Power Administration

Nelly Leap, an electrical engineer with Bonneville Power Administration since 1992, specializes in industrial energy conservation. She provides technical support for energy efficiency improvement projects to electric utilities, industrial end users and consultants.

The assistant project manager for the Industrial Power Factor Analysis Guidebook, Case Studies and Software. Organizes and participates in the Power Factor workshops. She provides training to utilities and industrial customers to improve the power factor on their own by demonstrating the power factor in customized workshops. She applied the Industrial Power Factor Software to several Wendover, Nevada Power Factor projects. She performed the power factor compensation on the electrical circuits of the eight casinos, two industrial plants and two municipal sites.

A technical reviewer of the Power Quality Workbook. As a member of Power Quality team, she contributed to development and reviewing of the Power Quality Workbook, helps utilities and industrial customers to prevent power quality problems.

Nelly Leap holds a BSEE in Power Systems from Portland State University. Ms. Leap received her first BSEE specializing in Control System Engineering from Higher Mechanical and Electrical College Varna, Bulgaria.

Dennis J. Hansen, P.E.
Principal Engineer
PacifiCorp

Dennis is presently responsible for power quality programs and services for PacifiCorp. In this capacity he writes company PQ standards, represents the company at IEEE and other PQ and reliability meetings, helps solve customer PQ problems, is responsible for the creation and growth of the company's fixed PQ monitoring network and does system PQ studies.

He has been with PacifiCorp for 26 years, holding engineering positions in
the Protection and Control, R&D, Generation Engineering, Standards &
Technical Support, and Technology Development groups. For the last 8 years
he has focused primarily on power quality.