SOUTHWEST

Ron Starner looks in on Buckeye, Arizona; Henderson, Nevada; and Las Cruces, New Mexico. Plus an eye-catching little $2.3 billion project called Sphere in Las Vegas.

NEWS DIGEST

Vertical Takeoff in Dayton; a new NASA campus in Berkeley; Meta in Minnesota; Silfab Solar in South Carolina; a battery project in Pittsburgh; and CBRE’s Top 10 markets for office conversions.

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Among the clean-tech projects announced in the wake of the IRA coming into effect is a $500 million, 400-job expansion of ZF Group’s 10-year-old transmission plant in Gray Court, South Carolina, to encompass electric transmission work.

Photo courtesy of ZF Group

A report from Oxford Economics in collaboration with Energy UK says the Inflation Reduction Act already has “had a triple-whammy effect” on the U.S. renewable energy industry, “increasing the number of new clean energy plants under construction, expanding shipments of equipment and raising stock market valuations of low-carbon technology firms.” The IRA has a total budget of $369 billion for the period 2023-2031 with the majority of this funding in the form of tax credits to reward private investment in clean technology, transport and manufacturing. The report is part of a series focused on the clean growth gap in the UK.

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Atlanta, Georgia

Photo courtesy of Hunden Partners

Last week U.S. Soccer announced it had chosen the final location of its 200-acre National Training Center at Trilith, a development exactly 12.5 miles south of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Fayette County. The location is not only near the master-planned Town at Trilith, but also Trilith Studios, a film and TV production studio complex that has produced “Avengers: Endgame” and “WandaVision” among other films.

The news came not long after Chicago-based Hunden Partners released its “Top Ten Sports Host Cities” for hosting major sporting events, with Atlanta finishing No. 1. Read Ron Starner’s Online Insider about how Atlanta pulled off the U.S. Soccer project, and his piece from the 2022 Texas economic development guide on why sports, like everything else, go bigger in Texas.

The Top Ten Sports Host Cities (current)

1. Atlanta
2. Indianapolis
3. New York City
4. Kansas City
5. Dallas-Ft. Worth
6. Los Angeles
7. New Orleans
8. Charlotte
9. Las Vegas
10. Phoenix

Photos by Michael Moran courtesy of HGA

Design firm HGA, in collaboration with Consigli Construction Co., Inc., has announced the opening of Barry Mills Hall and the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, signifying what HGA calls “the first commercially scaled mass timber buildings in a state known for its abundant forests.” An HGA structural analysis estimated that a timber frame system would reduce the buildings’ embodied carbon footprint by approximately 75% when compared to a traditional steel structure.

University of Glasgow students Ashley Chai, Alessandro Peacock and Prajjwal Prajjwal — who took the lead in planning student engagement with Adam Smith’s tercentenary — admire an engraved paving stone memorial on High Street in Glasgow.