"Green" battery maker to buy Owl's Creek Golf course land and receive $1.8M from Virginia Beach
VIRGINIA BEACH
A company that wants to build a new manufacturing facility on part of a former golf course plans to add 1,100 jobs with an average annual salary of $74,000. It will receive millions in state incentives for the project, Gov. Terry McAuliffe announced Tuesday at the company’s offices on Lynnhaven Parkway.
A 540,000-square-foot building would be built on 30 acres currently owned by the city that once was part of Owl’s Creek Golf Center.
The city plans to transfer the land to the Virginia Beach Development Authority, which would sell the site to Global Technical Systems for $1.2 million. The company would pay about $282,000 annually in real estate taxes to the city. It also plans to invest $54.7 million in the project.
Once the factory is running – the plan is to open it in March 2019 – the company will be eligible for $7.8 million in state grants and incentives. The Development Authority could kick in another $1.8 million if the company meets its investment and job creation goals, bringing the total incentives to nearly $10 million.
The company will make batteries that can store and produce energy. Its scientists have developed a flywheel rotor system that is capable of storing large amounts of kinetic energy for 50 to 100 years, said Terry Spitzer, who owns the company with his wife, Yusun. The energy comes from electricity, sun or wind and is stored – and later released – by the battery’s technology, he said.
He compared it to the cast-iron flywheel first used to power steam engines in the late 1880s.
The batteries will vary in size and capability – they can fit in a soda can or a semitruck – with the most advanced able to power ships, Spitzer said.
“Think of it as an extreme battery,” he said. “Stored energy waiting and ready when you need it.”
They can be used to power machinery, data centers or even cities, Spitzer said.
Global Technical Systems has mainly focused on government contracts until now.
Its customer list has included the Navy, the Department of Homeland Security, Coast Guard and Special Operations Command.
Last year, Spitzer’s company received an Economic Development grant for an expansion of its headquarters on Lynnhaven Parkway.
“Virginia Beach has been good to us,” he said.
With the Birdneck Road factory, the company wants to turn its focus to commercial clients, including energy providers and data centers. Virginia Beach has a new transatlantic cable, Marea, built by Microsoft and Facebook, connecting to Bilbao, Spain, for faster data transfers between the U.S. and Europe.
“We’re moving into more of a commercial direction to what we’ve been doing,” Spitzer said.
The property is in a historically underutilized business zone, a designation of the Small Business Administration. The company plans to train and hire Seatack residents, and the community’s civic league has supported the redevelopment. As an employer in such a zone, it would get a leg up on future federal contracts.
Some residents who live across the street recently told The Virginian-Pilot they have concerns about the transparency of the deal, noting that the city withheld the name of the company looking to redevelop the site and potential environmental impacts to the land and added traffic near their homes.
Spitzer said he wants to keep three sides of the building clear from development with a natural setting. He’s also considering leasing some of the adjacent golf course property, which is owned by Nancy Braithwaite.
“This is not going to be an ugly factory,” Spitzer said. “I want it to look beautiful.”