Wind could be next cash crop in state

Rex Bowman, Media General News Service
Published: December 2, 2008

RICHMOND — Where tobacco once formed the foundation of the economies in Southside and parts of Southwest Virginia, the cash crop of the future could turn out to be energy research.

Using $32 million wrung from tobacco companies a decade ago, the communities of Lynchburg, Danville, South Boston and Abingdon are preparing to build four energy-research centers where scientists from Virginia Tech, other institutions and private businesses could work to find solutions to the nation’s, and world’s, energy problems.

To the Lynchburg center goes the task of nuclear research. To Danville, bio-energy. To South Boston, wind turbines and green engineering. And to Abingdon, clean coal and natural gas.

The goal, according to leaders of the effort, is to use the centers as magnets to attract technology and energy companies. That way, they hope to transform the rural landscape from a vast patchwork of abandoned tobacco fields to a series of booming industrial hubs, with a pivotal role to play in the nation’s quest for energy independence.

“These research centers are a different type of economic development,” said Robert Bailey, executive director of Lynchburg’s Center for Advanced Engineering and Research, which plans to use its $8 million share of the tobacco settlement money to build a center dedicated to nuclear research.

“Jobs will occur where people are having good ideas. A research center is essentially an incubator for ideas.”

The $32 million, handed out this summer by the Virginia Tobacco and Indemnification and Community Revitalization Commission, covers only the cost of building the offices and laboratories for the research centers. The centers are in the process of trying to find additional funding to pay operational costs.

“We’ll certainly turn over every rock,” said Ted Settle, director of the Office of Economic Development at Tech and one of the proponents of the initiative.

Settle said he and others have been working on the project since Gov. Mark R. Warner’s administration. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine also has embraced the idea of a series of energy research centers, endorsing them in the energy plan he released in September 2007.

The energy research was parceled out to four different centers instead of being kept at a single lab to take advantage of the unique assets of each community, Settle said. The Lynchburg center was tasked to work on nuclear issues, for instance, because Areva, one of a small number of nuclear power plant builders, has a facility in Lynchburg.

Offering examples of ways the research center could help Areva, Bailey said the center could develop methods to test pressure pipes without destroying them and study ways liquids react under pressure.

Abingdon was picked as the site for the Clean Coal and Natural Gas Energy Center because of the town’s proximity to Virginia’s coalfields.

Danville, in the middle of farm fields that no longer sprout tobacco, will host the Sustainable Energy Technology Center, where researchers will try to find ways to make growing crops for fuel a profitable venture.

“Our goal is to create a bio-based industry in Southside Virginia,” said John Kennedy of Danville’s Institute for Advanced Learning and Research and project manager for the new research center.

Kennedy said he envisions up to 50 people — researchers, technicians, support staff and graduate students — working at the research center.

South Boston was tapped as the site for the Clean Energy Business Incubator Center because the Virginia Tech Modeling and Simulation Center is there.

Carole Cameron Inge, executive director of the simulation center, said she hopes to see researchers from private companies using the new center to find ways to make their businesses more energy-efficient.

“Companies and corporations and big plants are having some big energy problems,” she said. “Our goal is to identify where those problems are and then identify those technologies that help and then bring them to the marketplace.”

Unlike the other three centers, the one in South Boston also will include a manufacturing component, meaning that it potentially has the ability to build any technology it envisions.

While plans for the other research centers still are in the early stages, Cameron Inge said the one in South Boston could be up and running by July.

Rex Bowman is a staff writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.