Will Payne, director of InvestSWVA and managing partner of Coalfield Strategie, says Southwest Virginia’s solar and geothermal assets make it a good fit for data centers.
As part of an effort to entice data centers to locate in the region, Southwest Virginia leaders announced Tuesday a joint agreement to set what will be Virginia’s lowest regional property tax rate on data center equipment.
The localities comprising the Lonesome Pine Regional Industrial Facilities Authority — Dickenson, Lee, Scott and Wise counties and Norton — have entered into an agreement to each establish a tax rate of 24 cents per $100 on data center equipment. By comparison, Henrico County slashed its data center equipment tax rate to 40 cents on every $100 in March 2017 in order to attract the $1.75 billion Facebook data center, which opened last year at the county’s White Oak Technology Park in Sandston. At the time, Henrico’s was the lowest such tax rate in the state.
Now, through its Project Oasis initiative, the region hopes to leverage the area’s underground water in former coal mines to provide free geothermal cooling as a significant savings tool for data centers, which typically rack up high HVAC utility and maintenance bills to keep equipment from overheating. The block tax rate is intended as an additional incentive to the region’s offer of available and cheap land, geothermal cooling and workforce readiness and development.
