Think Amazon’s pullback from fulfillment centers investment represents a
moratorium on facility development? Think again. One piece of evidence
is this massive “pre-first-mile” operation located across the street
from the company’s first-mile fulfillment center that opened in Deltona
in September 2020. An Amazon spokesman told the Daytona Beach
News-Journal that the new facility is the first of its kind in Florida
and will store product before it travels across the street to be picked,
packed and shipped. The facility is the first of several to be
constructed at the new I-4 Logistics Park.
The other side of Amazon — Amazon Web Services — continues to invest
globally in its data center infrastructure and Cloud Regions even as it
lays off thousands. AWS launched two new “AWS Local Zones” in Australia
and Chile in January. The company plans to invest $9 billion over the
next five years in Australia, with $7.5 billion in the Sydney region and
the remainder going toward this data center infrastructure investment in
Melbourne. The company now has 32 Local Zones globally, with plans to
launch 20 more.
More than 650 Chicago-area firefighters from 20 different units
participated in high-rise fire training exercises over the last two
weeks at the former Allstate campus in Glenview, Illinois.
Photo courtesy of Dermody
Got an office building or corporate campus you’re getting
ready to demolish? Why not offer it to area first responders
for training before the implosions begin? That’s what
Dermody Properties has done with the former Allstate campus
in the Chicago-area community of Glenview. In addition to
other training sessions by area police and SWAT teams, more
than 650 firefighters from 20 communities have trained in
live fire conditions there over the past two weeks with the
Illinois Fire Service Institute in order to practice in
“real world conditions they would face in the first few
minutes of a fire in a high-rise building.” The training was
especially meaningful given the deaths of two Chicago
firefighters in the line of duty earlier this month.
Dermody Properties Midwest Region Partner Neal Driscoll said
first responder departments from the Village of Glenview
“reached out to us shortly after acquiring the campus with
interest in completing exercises before the buildings were
demolished. This was a rare opportunity to train on a
property of scale, since it includes a campus of varying
low- and mid-rise office buildings … Our redevelopment of
the office campus to modern industrial provided a window of
opportunity for area first responders to train.”
Soon the 232-acre property will be the home of what Dermody
calls The Logistics Campus, offering 3.2 million sq. ft. of
buildings in various sizes, with the flexibility to
accommodate build-to-suits, Dermody said.
PHOTO OF THE
DAY
Photo courtesy of Iberdrola
This photo comes from what was until very recently the largest solar
installation in Europe, Iberdrola’s 500-MW Núñez de Balboa project in
Usagre, Spain in the western Spanish region of Extremadura. (The €300
million, 590-MW Francisco Pizarro plant, also located in the region,
just surpassed it.) According to published reports, a Spanish judge ruled last
summer that Iberdrola must return half the land of the 1,000-hectare
(2,470-acre) solar farm to the owner after having expropriated it for
the project. Iberdrola is appealing the ruling and has reiterated that
the operation continues to produce power and “there will be no
dismantling.” The entire installation went into service in 2020 with
1,430,000 PV panels in place.
Iberdrola has reported that in Q1 of this year it exceeded 40,000 MW of
installed renewables capacity, with PV solar capacity having risen by
40% due to new installations in Australia, Spain, the United States and
Brazil. In Extremadura alone it now has 12 solar plants in operation
producing 2,000 MW.
