A 700-acre solar farm on a former surface mine outside of Hurley willbe more than it appears, according to Adam Edelen.
“Buchanan County and the entire region of Southwestern Virginia intends to benefit from the digital economy rather than be a victim of it,” says Edelen, CEO of Edelen Renewables.
Based in Lexington, Kentucky, Edelen’s company has partnered with Savion, a Kansas City-based solar developer involved in 156 projects in 28 states, including five in Virginia, but this is Edelen’s first collaboration with Savion in the commonwealth.
With groundbreaking set for 2023, the $100 million, 75-megawatt solar farm will generate about $100,000 in annual tax revenue for Buchanan County, create about six permanent jobs and 250 construction jobs. Edelen says there will be a “heavy focus on hiring local.” He plans for workers to finish the yearlong job with “an academic credential that will certify them as utility-scale solar installers.”
The largest anticipated economic impact is the business the solar farm might attract.
“Access to green energy is a precondition for modern economic development,” Edelen says. “To be relevant to the opportunities of the digital economy, you have to have clean energy.”
Jonathan Belcher, executive director of the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority, agrees. “That’s clearly where the national and global economy, [the] energy economy, is headed.”
In this case, the new energy economy will be sharing space with the old.
“They will actually be installing solar panels while they’re still mining coal,” says Del. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell, whom Kentucky-based CM Mining asked to help arrange the project. The company also plans to put several thousand mined acres in a conservation easement. Morefield calls it “one of the country’s first mining operations that is not only mining coal, but they’re making efforts to reduce the carbon footprint.”
Surface mines and solar farms have considerable overlap in infrastructure: high-capacity transmission lines; access to roads and rail lines; and flat land, according to Edelen. Surface mines require the first two and create the third.
Government support helps, too.
“Virginia has done a better job than almost any state in the entire United States in envisioning a renewable energy future,” Edelen says. That support runs from the county to the General Assembly and across party lines, he says. “Green energy isn’t partisan. It’s just smart.” ν
A Russell County native and a Singapore-based asset management firm are about to turn a corner of Virginia’s coalfields into an aquaculture center.
Jake Musick’s Riverbound Trout Farms is building a processing plant in Russell County. Musick expects to begin shipping fish this fall. About a quarter mile away, straddling the Russell-Tazewell county line, Pure Salmon, backed by 8F Asset Management, plans to send the first fish out of its plant in 2023.
“That location is kind of becoming a hub for aquaculture,” says Jonathan Belcher, executive director of the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority. “We feel like that’s got a lot of growth potential for the region.”
The spokes on that hub are very different, however. Riverbound wants other local entrepreneurs to develop the trout-producing equivalent of feed lots, supplying most of the 750,000 pounds of processed fish Riverbound aims to produce per year. “It’s going to help a lot of people, hopefully, to get into the business,” Musick says. “The big push is to get more farmers involved and create a green agricultural industry in Southwest Virginia.”
Riverbound, which ultimately aims to employ 20 people, received a $500,000 low-interest loan from the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority, and the company will be paying the Tazewell County Industrial Development Authority for Musick’s processing facility over 10 years.
Pure Salmon landed a much larger incentive package — $14.5 million, mostly in loans. It plans to employ 10 times as many people and invest $228 million. Code-named Project Jonah, after the biblical prophet who was swallowed by a great fish, the drive to get Pure Salmon on the hook lasted several years, involving a few extended deadlines. Pure Salmon representative Lala Korall praises Del. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell, and the state and local agencies involved in the deal. “Very often it’s the atmosphere in which you work to prepare a project that is crucial,” she says, “and they have been really pleasant and forthcoming and supportive.”
Buchanan, Russell and Tazewell counties also agreed to share in the potential profits.
During construction, Korall says, the project will employ more than 400 people. After that, Pure Salmon plans to process 20,000 tons of fish per year, employing 203 people at an average annual wage of $59,500 — more than $27,000 higher than Buchanan County‘s median household income.
“That,” Belcher says, “is a very good average wage for our region.”
On a vacated railroad line that runs nearly 50 miles, from just outside Front Royal through Shenandoah County and down to the Rockingham County town of Broadway, McCleary envisions creating a trail for bicyclists, walkers and runners. The trail’s planned pathway wanders through Civil War battlefields, connecting to 12 miles of trails in Woodstock’s new Seven Bends State Park and the George Washington National Forest.
Most importantly, McCleary says, “It runs through the spine of each of the towns along the way,” drawing tourists and sparking economic development all along the corridor.
This vision is informally known as the Shenandoah Valley Rail Trail, a proposed pedestrian throughfare that local leaders hope will be a boon to local businesses. Richmond-based Chmura Economics & Analytics LLC estimates the trail could attract 280,334 visitors per year, generating a $15.5 million economic impact annually and 140 jobs. The land for the trail is owned by Norfolk Southern Railway, which is open to selling it.
The idea for the trail began in 2010, when Brandon Davis, executive director of the Northern Shenandoah Valley Regional Commission, proposed it as a Shenandoah County planner. The concept got a boost in 2016 after McCleary appointed a committee in the hopes of making it real. Finally, during its 2020 special session, the General Assembly approved a feasibility study for the project.
Because the legislature didn’t make an allocation for the trail project, Jennifer Wampler, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s trail coordinator, must work to secure funding. That effort may entail seeking funds from local governments and stakeholders, as well as looking to studies and real-life examples for models.
“We [already] have a 57-mile rail trail that can offer us a lot of insights into what some of the operational costs will be,” Wampler explains, referring to the rail trail the department has managed since 1987 at New River Trail State Park in Southwest Virginia.
DCR must now examine the Shenandoah-area corridor, determine acquisition costs, explore how the trail would be managed and measure local support for the project.
McCleary has confidence in the latter topic.
“People that wouldn’t agree on a whole lot of stuff agree on this particular issue,” he says. “This could be so fantastic for our community and for the region.”
The results of the feasibility study are due to the legislature by November.
More than 40 years ago, local governments in Appalachian Power’s service area banded together to negotiate rates. Now, Rocky Mount Town Manager James Ervin, chair of the steering committee that leads negotiations, says that’s worked out well. “We pay a rate that is considerably less than a comparable private sector business,” he says.
But there can be complications.
Last year, the General Assembly passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act, which allows Appalachian Power customers to pursue third-party power purchase agreements and limits third-party power generation to 40 megawatts.
However, a contract the local governments signed in 2016 prohibits third-party agreements and restricts the entire region to generating 4 megawatts. That contract expired in June 2020, but the parties are bound by it until they sign a replacement, which will likely be delayed until Appalachian Power resolves a dispute with the State Corporation Commission over a proposed rate increase. Appalachian Power has said it intends to appeal the SCC rejection to the Virginia Supreme Court.
Power generation wasn’t a hot topic in 2016, Ervin says. But now, he says, “It’s the perfect harmony of fiscal conservatism and environmental stewardship. You can save money and you can lower your carbon footprint, so it’s sort of a universal thing that they want to do.”
Even school boards in the coalfield counties of Wise and Tazewell passed a resolution supporting a new agreement that would accommodate solar power generation. One attraction is the possibility of a third party absorbing up-front costs for solar installation.
“At this time, schools cannot partner with anyone and would have to foot the bill for the entire cost of anything related to the transition to full or partial solar energy,” says Tazewell County Schools Superintendent Christopher Stacy. “We are not in the process of looking to move to solar energy. We would just like the ability if we ever decide to go in that direction.”
The complication on Appalachian Power’s side is that if customers generate more of their own electricity, they’ll buy less from the utility. “The major issue is how to keep rates low for the collective group, while accommodating more solar-generated electricity,” says Appalachian Power spokesperson Teresa Hamilton Hall.
Ervin expects the cost impact to be small.
“The rates we have now versus the rates we’re likely to get, they’re not going to be drastically different,” he says. “That’s the goal of a regulated utility market.”
Abingdon’s Moonlite Theatre is on the National Register of Historic Places and in the lyrics of at least two country western songs, but the drive-in movie theater was closed for most of the last decade.
When Katy Brown visited it last spring, “it was a wreck,” she recalls, “but I thought all we’d have to do is put a stage up here. This could happen.”
Barter Theatre’s producing artistic director, Brown decided that the Moonlite was the place to produce plays during a pandemic. COVID-19 forced Barter to shut down its spring schedule and furlough 93 of its 104 employees. But with help and support from Abingdon-area businesses, Barter staged performances that projected on Moonlite’s 65-foot-tall screen and broadcast on car radios.
Shows ran through the summer, with two productions around Halloween and two for Christmas. Barter increased its staff for the productions to 53 workers, not all of them full-time. Ten actors and a stage manager lived at the Barter Inn from June until the night before Christmas Eve.
“You can truly be absolutely distant and together,” Brown says. “I’m so proud that we’re doing something that can give people some kind of connection and is actually honest-to-God fun.”
Terrance Jackson, a creative content specialist with Barter’s marketing team, played nine roles in two Christmas plays. With all that togetherness, the cast learned “how to navigate the good days, the bad days and what each other needs to function, to make the best possible art that we can make,” he says.
Making art requires money, and the Moonlite’s one show per evening couldn’t replace the revenue generated by Barter, its Smith Theatre and traveling shows. Ticket sales usually provide 60% to 70% of the theater’s budget, which was $6.4 million pre-COVID, so Barter is depending on fundraising more than usual. Brown won’t reveal the target. “We’re just trying to be understanding that people can give what they can give right now,” she says.
According to Brown, Barter has received $100,000 in federal CARES Act funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and local governments, and she expected another $50,000 by the end of 2020.
“The community’s response to this, the region’s response to this, has been great,” Brown says, “and we couldn’t have done it without that.”
Like other coalfield communities coping with the downturn of its signature industry, Norton is working to reinvent itself, says City Manager Fred Ramey.
This fall, the city’s three-year, $2.3 million downtown revitalization reached a “technical end, but our project is not over and we’ll keep going,” says Ramey, who spearheaded the Downtown Norton Revitalization Project.
Work included installing lampposts like those the city had in the 1940s, and adding new building façades, trees, sidewalks and signs, all in the hopes of drawing more businesses downtown. The city received two Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development grants for streetscape improvements and the redevelopment of a former auto dealership that has become a farmers market and the home of Sugar Hill Cidery.
Greg and Jennifer Bailey, who started Sugar Hill Brewery in nearby St. Paul, weren’t planning to start a new business, but Ramey’s persuasiveness eventually won them over.
“That’s a whole lot of why we started in Norton. We could see Fred’s vision,” says Jennifer Bailey. “It was really him communicating his vision to us and us catching that vision.”
The Baileys aren’t the only business owners who are bullish on Norton. The Glass Slipper Boutique and G2K Games, a comics and games retailer, returned downtown after moving to a shopping center. A pizza restaurant is taking over a building that housed the local newspaper, The Coalfield Progress, which moved across the street last year. A coffee shop, a bakery and a furniture restoration company also have opened downtown this year.
Norton already has a reputation for outdoor activity. The city owns 1,000 acres on High Knob mountain, which overlooks downtown and includes Flag Rock Park, so it it’s only natural the city’s reinvention involves outdoor recreation.
The park has 10 miles of mountain bike trails, a campground, an overlook and a statue of Bigfoot’s cousin, the Woodbooger — as well as an annual Woodbooger festival, although it was canceled this year. A 10K race, a half-marathon and a 100-mile ultra-marathon also connect downtown Norton to the park.
“We want people to come and enjoy that, and then come down and eat and enjoy themselves downtown,” Ramey says. “We look at our downtown to try to keep it vibrant, keep it active, keep people working downtown, and this is just our latest project to try to keep doing that.”
The 1862 Morrill Act, which created land-grant universities including Virginia Tech, requires such universities to “teach such branches of learning as are related to … agriculture and the mechanical arts … to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”
Tech and every other university that receives federal research funding became more enmeshed in commerce in 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act required those universities to attempt to commercialize research and share resulting revenues with inventors. Virginia Tech’s marketplace bond strengthened again in 2017, when Brandy Salmon, vice president for innovation and partnerships, joined the university and created Link+License+Launch, the university’s “center for industrial partnerships.”
“It wasn’t that we didn’t do industry partnership work or tech transfer” before she arrived, Salmon says. Her task was to “create a more deliberate and integrated approach.”
Last fiscal year, Link+License+Launch was involved with 20 license and option deals and six startup deals. It brought in more than $1.4 million in direct licensing revenue.
The initiative’s “Link” component serves companies that already have a relationship with the university, as well as companies the university wants to cultivate. “License,” as its name implies, focuses on licensing technology and “Launch” is all about startups.
Virginia Tech chemistry professor Webster Santos received a proof of concept grant to fund experiments on a potential drug to treat multiple sclerosis.
“Working with industry is not for all faculty and not for all programs,” Salmon admits, “but for those that have an applied nature or there’s technology or R&D or even talent that has an external view [or] opportunity, then we really support that. … To me, Link, License and Launch is really the launch pad for us continuing to build our support for our innovation ecosystem. … It’s really about providing a service to our constituents.”
Any university’s mission is threefold: teaching, research and impact, says Mark Mondry, associate director of Launch.
“That can be impact on the economy. It can be impact on humanity. It could be anything in between,” he says. “But this is mostly about, how do we use the assets in the first two to leverage and amplify the third mission of societal and economic impact?”
Mondry oversees the university’s latest tool in the drive to leverage and amplify and impact: proof of concept (POC) grants. The grants, which offer up to $50,000 to Virginia Tech researchers, are meant to help innovators bridge the distance between idea and product. Most of Virginia Tech’s $531 million in research funding comes from the federal government. And much of Tech’s research could be potentially valuable in societal and economic terms. But commercializing it requires money. Uncertainty and risk, which are abundant in early research and development stages, may repel private funding.
“Uncertainty both in the technology — Can we make it at scale? Does it work? Does it do the kind of things that we hope it will do? — but also around the market,” Mondry says. “Is the market looking for what this technology offers? Do we know who might be interested in it and why? Public money is best positioned to fill that gap, because the private money is willing to wait.”
While private money waits to see how things develop, innovations are left with a funding gap, a potentially fatal condition no matter how good an idea may be.
“The goal of the POC funding is quite simple,” Mondry says. “The goal is to have awardees succeed in capturing their next round of commercialization funding.”
Ready for the big time
A POC grant may fund experiments, as it will with a multiple sclerosis-fighting drug being developed by Virginia Tech chemistry Professor Webster Santos and University of Virginia Professor and Vice Chair of Pharmacology Kevin Lynch. The results are promising so far, but the team needs to validate its results with larger-scale experiments. If those experiments work, Santos says, “Bigger companies will know who we are and hopefully they’d want to partner with us. And so we’d go from a $15 million company to a $150 million company and, if it all works out, it’s a $1 billion company.”
Jonathan Boreyko and Brook Kennedy are developing a fog harp, a device to harvest water from fog.
Ed Fox, a Virginia Tech professor of computer science, already has a company that funded his development of software to summarize legal depositions and other long and complicated documents. A POC grant will help get the software into trials by the people intended to be its end users.
“We’ve been at it for more than three years, but to get this into the commercial world, it takes more than just doing the research. It takes understanding the business world and so on,” Fox says. “There’s a bit of a gap between proving something and publishing about it and being able to show the method works … better than other techniques and turning it into something that will be appealing in the commercial sector.”
John Robertson, a Virginia Tech professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics, is in a similar place. His team is using laser energy to analyze urine. Their diagnostic method can quickly and accurately detect indications of all sorts of illnesses, but they need to build a sturdy prototype that will perform the tests in batches and then evaluate that prototype in real-life conditions.
“It’s not just sitting in the research labs and doing stuff that stays in Blacksburg,” Robertson says. “It’s really going out into the broader world and [taking] things that we invent and have them see the light of day and help people.”
Some researchers think about marketing potential long before their innovations are ready to be commercialized. Jonathan Boreyko, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Brook Kennedy, associate professor in the Virginia Tech School of Architecture + Design, are developing a fog harp, an improvement on fog harvesters that use nets to capture potable water from fog. Boreyko and Kennedy’s design uses vertical wires, a much more efficient design.
Boreyko thought of calling the device a fog loom, since all the strings on the square-meter device are the same length. “I went down to my lab and asked all my international students,” Boreyko says, “‘Who here has heard of a harp?’ and they all raised their hands. Then I asked, ‘Who’s heard of a loom?’ and it was just crickets.”
So, fog harp it is.
“You can have the best invention or science breakthrough in the world, but if you can’t explain it in an exciting or intuitive way, then no one’s going to care,” Boreyko says. “‘Fog harp’ is more evocative than saying a fog net with the crosswires removed.”
Virginia Tech At A Glance
Founded
Virginia’s original land-grant university, Virginia Tech was known as Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College when it was founded in 1872. Now, as Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, it is the state’s second-largest public university by enrollment.
Campus
Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg main campus stretches over 2,600 acres. Tech also has six regional presences statewide and a study-abroad campus in Switzerland. Currently, the university is building its $1 billion Innovation Campus in Alexandria, near the Amazon.com Inc. HQ2 site.
Employees
Approximately 11,000 non-faculty staff members
Faculty 2,070 full- and part-time faculty;
51% are tenured
Tuition and fees, housing and financial aid*
Undergraduate in-state tuition and fees: $13,691
Undergraduate out-of-state tuition and fees: $32,835
Room and board and other fees: $9,342
Average financial aid awarded to full-time, in-state undergraduates seeking assistance in 2020-21: $8,588
It’s about gaps. Gaps between the uncertainties that exist and the uncertainties investors are willing to accept. Gaps between a working prototype and a mass-produced model. Gaps between what researchers produce and what the market wants to buy.
Virginia tech’s proof-of-concept (POC) grants aim to help university researchers bridge those obstacles to commercializing their research. The first round of POC research grant recipients range from a device that catches water from fog to software that summarizes legal documents. Here are the first projects selected for Tech’s POC grants:
Rametrix AutoScanner automated molecular urinalysis system
A Raman spectroscopy-based technology analyzes urine specimens and identifies biomarker patterns associated with cancer, infections or organ failure. The POC grant will help the team automate the process. “Our goal is to take the working prototype and make it into a commercializable device,” says John Robertson, professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics. His research team is working with the Floyd Custom Machine & Design machine shop on “little things that are form, fit and factor that eggheads like myself don’t even think about.”
Deposition and testimony summarization
The grant will facilitate pilot deployments to prove the efficacy of software designed to produce short summaries of long, complicated documents such as legal depositions. “We’ve done all this sort of scientific stuff,” says Ed Fox, professor of computer science, “but to actually see if this is going to be of commercial utility, you have to put it out there in someone’s real context.”
S1P modulation and multiple sclerosis
In small-scale tests on mice, this drug developed at Virginia Tech blocks an enzyme that sets multiple sclerosis in motion. POC grant funding will finance larger tests. “What the fund is doing is giving us money to validate our idea,” says Webster Santos, professor of chemistry. “If we can show this compound is effective in mouse models en masse, that is a game changer.”
Fog harps for ultra-efficient water harvesting
This new fog harvester design collects up to 78 times more water than previous versions. The device could be used for applications ranging from agriculture to battling global water shortages.
“The POC funds have been great for us because we feel like we’re only about a year out from having a very viable and mass manufacturable approach,” says Jonathan Boreyko, associate professor of mechanical engineering.
Two or three questions about design optimization remain, and the team needs to figure out how to go from manual to mass production. “The POC funds,” Boreyko says, “are going to give us a year’s worth of time and money to answer those kinds of final factors.”
Tool-support exoskeleton for industrial applications
This lightweight, low-profile exoskeleton would prevent injuries and fatigue for workers who have to support the weight of heavy, handheld tools. The POC grant will allow a team led by Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Alan Asbeck to optimize the design, test prototypes and work on customer discovery.
Lexington memorializes Confederate Gens. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee so much, Lee’s final resting place in the city was described as “a kind of Confederate Graceland” in a 2009 Washington Post travel story.
Lexington’s image changed some this summer, however. While Virginia Military Institute refused to remove Confederate statues and names from its campus, Carilion Clinic acquired the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hospital and renamed it Carilion Rockbridge Community Hospital. The Robert E. Lee Hotel, which opened in 1926, became The Gin, and the city-owned Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery, where Jackson’s statue stands over his grave, became Oak Grove Cemetery.
“It was not something that was on my radar,” Vice Mayor Marylin Alexander, the only Black member on Lexington City Council, says of the cemetery.
When letters began to pour in calling for the change as anti-racism protests spread nationwide, Alexander was apprehensive. She knew about the city’s previous fights over Confederate symbols and wasn’t sure this was a brouhaha the city needed. Then someone showed her the cemetery’s 1971 regulations: Only white people were allowed to be buried there.
“It just hit me,” she says. “It started … flooding back what the Confederacy meant to me, what it would mean to my ancestors. I started realizing that when you’re Black and you’re surrounded by that, and you have no choice but to live with it and to accept it, it does something to you.”
City Council voted in August to rename the burying ground Oak Grove Cemetery. Some opponents claim council is changing history, but Jackson’s remains were in the graveyard for more than half a century before the graveyard was named for him.
Jean Clark, director of tourism for Lexington and Rockbridge County, says people still come to the area for Civil War history, but they don’t arrive in busloads like they used to. People visit the Upper James River Water Trail, the Shenandoah Beerwerks Trail and Natural Bridge State Park. Last year, the city removed a dam, freeing another section of the Maury River near Jordan’s Point Park for kayakers and canoers.
“We have a big backyard,” Clark says, “and we have plenty to draw folks in.”
Mayor Frank Friedman and Vice Mayor Alexander say Lexington residents are planning to expand on the city’s Black history and celebrate Juneteenth next year, and others are raising funds for Black entrepreneurs.
“There’s a lot that we’re looking forward to,” Alexander says.
Founded by two brothers 120 years ago, Mack Trucks Inc. is an iconic American brand and image — snub-nosed trucks adorned with bulldogs because of a nickname earned in World War I. And since Sept. 1, all of Mack’s medium duty trucks are being built in Roanoke County’s Valley TechPark.
The company, part of Sweden’s Volvo Group, stopped building medium duty trucks in 2002, says Antonio Servidoni, vice president of Mack Trucks’ medium duty operations. The upgrades required to meet emissions regulations, he says, “would have been cost-prohibitive, considering the relatively low volume of the medium duty market at that time.”
But customers wanted a full line of the trucks, Servidoni says, so Mack is back in the medium duty business.
Jill Loope, Roanoke County’s director of economic development, calls this “a transformative project, not just for the county, but for the region. … The growth potential is tremendous.”
The Roanoke Regional Partnership predicts the factory will have an annual economic impact of more than $364 million, and Servidoni expects to have hired 250 people by February. By late August, the plant employed about 130 workers.
Mack also is buying components from manufacturers throughout the region. Cummins Inc.’s Rocky Mount Engine Plant and Meritor Inc., both in North Carolina, supply the new trucks’ drivelines, while Roanoke’s Metalsa Structural Products Inc. provides the frame rails, and Commercial Vehicle Group of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, builds the cabs. Other local businesses supply smaller parts.
Servidoni says the company chose Roanoke County because of its proximity to suppliers, Mack’s Greensboro, North Carolina, headquarters and Interstate 81, “which allows us to leverage the logistics flows.” The new plant is also a short drive from Dublin, home to the largest Volvo truck plant in North America.
The building, a former printing plant, required few alterations and is easily expandable, he adds. Mack plans to invest $13 million in the project, and the state awarded the company $700,000 from its Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund (matched by Roanoke County), as well as $150,000 for worker training.
That training is intensive, Servidoni says. Some of his employees have truck-building experience, he says, but most
do not.
While the Volvo plant in Dublin has cyclical layoffs as the long-haul truck market rises and falls, Mack’s medium duty plant is unlikely to follow the same rhythm. That market, Servidoni says, “has historically been more consistent.”
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