FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – T.A. Walton will serve as the new managing director of the National Center for Reliable Electric Power Transmission. Walton will be in charge of the daily operations of the center and for the recruitment of students and member organizations. He will also build relationships with existing member organizations. 

Walton has extensive experience in account, operations and personnel management through his 23-year association with Procter & Gamble. During his years there, Walton completed training in the areas of Total Quality Management, High Performance Work Systems, and Customer Business Development, among others. In addition to these training programs, Walton holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Arkansas. Walton is a native of Forrest City, Ark.

The center’s lab is a two-story high-bay facility covering 7,000 square feet. It is capable of testing power systems up to 6.5 megawatts. The programmable loads will also avoid enormous energy waste by enabling the output energy to be recirculated. As a result, even at full power, only kilowatts of power will be drawn from the power grid.

The center’s test facility consists of several transformers, many circuit breakers and regeneration drives that are connected in a highly reconfigurable manner enabling many types of application scenarios including the simulation of distributed generation sources (wind, solar, etc.) and the testing of protection devices.

The center is funded as part of the federal government’s focus on research and development to improve technology for the nation’s power grid. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2003 and created the GridWorks Initiative in response to the massive blackout of the Northeast United States in 2003.