Category: Infrastructure
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Building on Virginia’s Data-Center Boom
Data centers are the hottest trend in Virginia economic development these days. But the state is only beginning to think through the implications. Loudoun County, home to 75 facilities, has developed the largest cluster of data centers in the country (and perhaps the world), and next-door-neighbor Prince William County is rising fast. Rural Mecklenburg County…
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Retrofitting Alexandria: Another Office-to-Residential Conversion
Washington, D.C.-based Perseus Realty has contracted to acquire a six-acre site in Alexandria’s Hoffman Town Center with plans to convert an obsolete, 610,000-square-foot building into a residential-dominated mixed-use project. Reports the Washington Business Journal: The effort, if approved, will entail the addition of 25,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, conversion of two lower floors into…
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Dominion Sings New Tune, Embraces Solar
Dominion expects to install up to 5,200 megawatts of solar generating capacity by 2042 — about thirteen times its current commitment and enough to power 1.3 million homes — according to forecasts contained in its 2017 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP). That represents a dramatic shift from forecasts in previous versions of the long-range planning document, which is filed…
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What’s Next for the Pipeline Controversies?
With the announcement last week that Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) would provide closer scrutiny of water-quality standards than legally required, battles over the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and Mountain Valley Pipeline shift from the federal level to the states. Foes of the natural gas pipelines have failed so far to block the projects in the…
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Virginia Tech OK’s Intelligent Infrastructure Initiative
The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors voted Monday to approve a $78 million plan to make the university a leader in “intelligent infrastructure.” The term encompasses everything from self-driving cars and drones to smart construction and energy systems — areas, in the words of President Tim Sands, that are “related to energy systems for the cities of the…
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The East-West Divide in Loudoun Broadband
From an article in today’s Loudoun Times-Mirror: 70% of the world’s Internet traffic reputedly passes through eastern Loudoun County, which has emerged as a world-class hub of fiber-optic trunk lines and data centers. Yet less than 20 miles away, 30,000 inhabitants of western Loudoun have lousy Internet access. “We just can’t get high-speed Internet,” said…
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Key Fiscal Concept: the Private-to-Public Investment Ratio
Charles Marohn, founder of the Strong Towns movement, is frequently queried if there is an ideal density for communities of a particular population and size. In “The Density Question,” he uses the question as a springboard to address a topic that really matters, the long-term fiscal sustainability of counties, towns and cities. Marohn’s answer: Density is a…
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Why So Long to Decide about Surry-Skiffes?
Tick, tock! The April 15 deadline is fast approaching for when Dominion Virginia Power will have to shut down its Yorktown One and Two coal-fired units, leaving the Virginia Peninsula vulnerable to blackouts. That risk will hang over the region, home to a half million people, for a year-and-a-half or more — for however long it…
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The Saga of HB 1774 — Recurrent Flooding and Flooded Roads
by Carol J. Bova HB 1774 was written to address rural stormwater issues and amended to study stormwater management practices in rural Virginia highway ditches. Why, then, does the bill direct the Commonwealth Center for Recurrent Flooding Resiliency, a group formed to help Virginia adapt to recurrent flooding and sea-level rise, to direct the study? The Commonwealth Center…
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Peninsula Still Needs Surry-Skiffes Project, Says PJM
PJM Interconnection may have lowered its forecasts for peak electricity load on the Virginia Peninsula, but the regional transmission organization still contends that the proposed Surry-Skiffes Creek high-voltage transmission line is still needed to avoid the risk of blackouts. “It is PJM’s determination that the current Skiffes Creek 500 kV project remains the most effective and…
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Virginia Beach, Emerging World-Class Data Hub
Speaking of Virginia Beach…. Here’s a more promising approach to economic development than building arenas in the hope of wrangling big-name concerts and basketball tourneys for 30 years into the future. Reports the Virginian-Pilot: A Dutch company wants to create a new data center park to draw the likes of Snapchat, IBM and Uber. NxtVn will…
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Virginia’s Infrastructure Deficit
I have often opined on Virginia’s hidden deficits — fiscal time bombs in the form of budgetary gimmicks, pension under-funding, and deferred infrastructure maintenance. These problems are national in scope, and Virginia has been somewhat less derelict in its duty than other states, but sooner or later the Old Dominion will have an ugly confrontation.…
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The Saga of HB 1774 — Starting Over
By Carol J. Bova In the second part of this series, I described how the General Assembly recognized intrinsic problems in HB 1774, a bill designed to remedy deficiencies in stormwater legislation enacted in 2016 and scheduled to go into effect July 1 this year. But instead of killing the bill, legislators passed a substitute. That…
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At Last, a Wind Farm Virginia Can Call Its Own
It looks like Virginia soon will have its first commercial wind farm. The Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has approved plans to build 25 giant turbines on a ridgeline in Botetourt County. Critical to the approval was an agreement by Charlottesville-based Apex Clean Energy to turn off turbines at its Rocky Forge site during warm,…
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The Saga of HB 1774 — Rural Growth, Stormwater Credits
By Carol J. Bova Virginia’s part-time legislators saw 3,168 bills introduced in the 2017 General Assembly session according to the Richmond Sunlight website. Inundated with such a volume of legislation, overworked part-time lawmakers are hard-pressed to grind through complex issues. In such circumstances, speeding bills through the legislature can lead to bad law. And that appears to have…