One year after a plant operated by the former Mylan Pharmaceuticals was
closed as the result of a merger, its new owner West Virginia University
is poised to transform the complex into an innovation center open to
businesses to perform research and expand the regional economy.
“The capabilities you see in places like Louisiana translate very
directly to offshore wind,” says Walt Musial, principal engineer at the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and leader of the federal
agency’s offshore wind research platform.
Tomorrow ComEd will join leaders of data center company CloudHQ and
community leaders for a groundbreaking event to launch construction on
CloudHQ Data Center Campus, which will bring a new $2.5 billion,
1.5-million-sq.-ft. hyperscale data center campus to Mount Prospect and
repurpose the former United Airlines Headquarters property. In a release
last week ComEd said the first phase of the data center campus, set for
completion in 2024, “will create hundreds of permanent new jobs and
support growing business technology needs in the region. It marks the
eighth new data center project to launch in the past year in ComEd’s
service territory in Chicagoland and northern Illinois.
As reported by The Telegraph and others, Cochin Shipyard Ltd. (CSL), an
enterprise owned by the Indian government, is investing in the revival
of units at a 200-year-old shipbuilding yard in Bengal in order to
manufacture inland and coastal cargo vessels, inland cruise vessels,
fishing vessels and small and medium ships for India’s Coast Guard and
Navy, among other vessels. “The East Coast of India has throughout been
the epicenter of maritime activity and has been the beacon for the
country as far as shipbuilding is concerned,” says the website of the
new operation. “Towards this CSL in its endeavor to further strengthen
the shipbuilding sector in this region has taken on the age old legacy
of Hooghly Dock and Port Engineers Ltd (HDPEL) who were the pioneers of
ship building in the eastern coast of the country.”
Last week Bruce Rasher, redevelopment manager for RACER
Trust, the organization created to clean up and position for
redevelopment properties and other facilities owned by the
former General Motors Corp. before its 2009 bankruptcy, was
named Linda Garczynski Brownfields Person of the Year by the
International City/County Management Association at the U.S.
EPA’s National Brownfields Training Conference in Oklahoma
City. Elliott P. Laws, of EPLET, LLC, administrative trustee
of RACER Trust, said Rasher’s “ability to find opportunities
amid obstacles, and to work collaboratively to remove those
obstacles, is a major reason why RACER has completed more
than 90 property transactions, attracting buyers and end
users whose investments are supporting thousands of jobs, billions in annual
economic output and contributing to the
revitalization of communities that were hit hard by previous
manufacturing job losses. “Among the many successful
redevelopments of former RACER Trust properties,” RACER
Trust said in a release, “are M1
Concourse in Pontiac, Mich.; the American Center for Mobility in
Ypsilanti Township, Mich.; Sirmax
North America, Inc., in Anderson, Ind.; idX Corporation in Fredericksburg,
Va.; Amazon.com near Wilmington, Del.;
and Lear
Corporation in Flint, Mich.
Analysis by Industrial Economics, Incorporated,
released the same day as the award announcement, found that
over the 11 years between RACER’s effective date of March
31, 2011, and April 1, 2022, RACER’s expenditures on
holding, cleanup and repositioning of properties, combined
with investments by buyers and end users of RACER’s former
GM properties, generated an estimated 71,633 jobs and $13.1
billion in one-time economic output for communities in 14
states. The estimated return was $18.85 for
every dollar spent by RACER and its buyers and end users.
RACER stands for Revitalizing Auto Communities Environmental
Response. Read Site Selection’s interviews with Bruce Rasher
from 2017 and 2012.
PHOTO OF THE
DAY
Photo of Frontier courtesy of ORNL
Last week the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory
(ORNL) in Tennessee celebrated the debut of Frontier, the world’s fastest
supercomputer and “the dawn of the exascale computing era,” said an ORNL
release. “Research that might once have taken weeks to complete,
Frontier will tear through in hours, even seconds,” said Deputy
Secretary of Energy David Turk. “Oak Ridge has positioned the United
States to lead the world in solving massive scientific challenges across
the board.” ORNL said Frontier in May 2022 earned its No. 1 ranking with
1.1 exaflops of performance — more than a quintillion, or 1018,
calculations per second — making it the fastest computer in the world
and the first to achieve exascale. ORNL’s scientific partners, such as
General Electric Aviation and GE Power, plan to leverage the power of
Frontier: “GE Aerospace and Research will be using exascale computing,
including time on the Frontier supercomputer, to revolutionize the
future of flight with sustainable hydrogen propulsion and hybrid
electric technologies,” said David Kepczynski, chief information officer
at GE Research. ORNL said Frontier’s deployment adds to ORNL’s nearly
20-year tradition of supercomputing excellence alongside predecessors Jaguar, Titan and Summit — each the world’s fastest
computer in its time. For more, read Ron Starner’s 2018 article about the lab’s computing breakthroughs and how that
firepower connects to economic development.
