Community Profile | Virginia Beach
Virginia Beach also wants to attract industries supplying components for East Coast offshore wind farms, including Richmond-based Dominion Energy Inc.’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project. In a pilot phase designed to generate energy for 3,000 homes, Dominion installed two massive, 600-foot-high wind turbines 27 miles off the Virginia Beach coastline last summer. By 2026, Dominion plans to build a major offshore wind farm there, erecting 188 turbines in adjacent waters — enough to power more than 650,000 homes. Achieving that ambitious goal will require establishing a wind energy construction supply chain that economic development officials foresee as becoming an East Coast hub as future offshore wind operations come online. “With that plethora of technology, there will be potential job opportunities as we attract companies,” Dyer adds. “This is a really desirous location for a lot of businesses, and we’re going to roll out the red carpet for them.”
Cable ready
A technology and innovation task force, chaired by former Virginia Beach City Council member Ben Davenport, is examining the city’s ability to attract high-end tech jobs and increase workforce- training opportunities. “One of the problems we have in Virginia Beach is a lack of job opportunities for recent college graduates,” Dyer says. “We want to create situations where people’s children can find jobs here and keep families intact. That’s the ultimate economic development objective.” Davenport, vice president of strategic
development at Global Technical Systems, adds that the city is a prime location for technology enterprises. “We want to continue the momentum in building the technology ecosystem in Virginia Beach and ultimately in all of Hampton Roads,” he says. “If we continue down the road we’re on and make this an attractive place economically for internet ventures, we will have tremendous success. There are a lot of opportunities we are going to be chasing.” Along with the subsea cables, Virginia Beach has one of the state’s lowest tax rates for data center equipment and one of the lowest municipal tax rates in the country, and officials worked with the U.S. Navy to
52 | JUNE 2021
Virginia Beach City Council member Ben Davenport is focused on attracting more high-tech jobs for local college graduates.
establish the nation’s first cable landing protection area. “We’ve created a business environment that incentivizes the location of these activities,” says Virginia Beach Economic Development Director Taylor Adams.
Site work has been completed and the foundation poured for the first phase of NAP (Network Access Point) of Virginia Beach, a spec data center under development across from the cable landing station. The project was announced in late 2018, but work was suspended because of the pandemic. Now, PointOne is negotiating with potential tenants as it prepares to resume construc- tion on the first of two 39,530-square-foot buildings on the 10.7-acre site. “We’re in the leasing stage with potential customers, but we don’t plan to start construction on the building until we secure a major tenant,” Clish says. Additionally, the center will be able to accommodate growth from the existing cables, as well as new cables landing in
Virginia Beach. “Virginia Beach is absolutely going to see two to five new cables in the next three to five years,” Clish adds. Although there is room for more subsea
cables, the city does not have available land to house massive data centers like Facebook’s 500-acre Henrico facility. “Virginia Beach doesn’t have that possibility,” Davenport acknowledges. “But we can work with other regional localities with more available landmass. As the region succeeds, our city succeeds.”
Wind energy Virginia Beach also is spearheading efforts to boost Hampton Roads’ role in constructing a supply chain for the offshore wind industry. “Virginia Beach is a leader, but it’s too big of an initiative for any one city to act alone,” Adams says, noting that Dominion Energy’s offshore wind farm is one of eight to 10 similar projects on the East Coast. “There certainly is enough volume to see some of the suppliers locally here. I don’t
Photo by Mark Rhodes
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