Friday, February 3rd, 2012 at 9:50 am
by roanoke.com
Advance Auto Parts Inc., the corporate powerhouse that flourished during the recession by selling replacement auto parts to a new-vehicle-shy American public, on Thursday announced an $8 million expansion of its Roanoke headquarters and 75 new jobs.
The new jobs, to be filled over three years, will pay between $35,000 and $85,000 a year, Mayor David Bowers said during a morning news conference.
The company is looking to add such functions as a call center, credit management, billing, accounts receivable and collections to support a soon-to-open commercial business office.
Advance Auto grew into a national chain by selling to the do-it-yourself market, but more recently has emphasized the rapid delivery of parts to commercial garages. Commercial-customer business functions have been handled by an outside contractor, but Advance Auto intends to create an in-house business office for commercial accounts and end the contract, spokeswoman Shelly Whitaker said.
The Financial Services Commercial Customer Care Center will be added to headquarters operations at 5008Airport Road, where 900 people are already employed. The company's overall employment in the Roanoke area stands at 1,600.
Advance Auto called its decision to expand in Roanoke — at a time when its executive officers work at a regional headquarters in Minnesota — is further proof of its allegiance to the city of its founding.
According to the company's statement, the Roanoke expansion "reaffirms the strong commitment between the Roanoke community and Advance Auto Parts."
But Roanoke was not the only community considered.
Bowers said Roanoke beat Houston for the project. Details of the competition were not released.
In addition, it took the involvement of Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Jim Cheng, who came from Richmond to make Advance's public announcement, to seal the deal.
While Cheng said nothing of his role in his remarks, Bowers told the crowd that Cheng "came to the rescue" when talks between Advance and government officials were in final moments.
Cheng could not be reached for comment after the news conference ended.
Suzanne West, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, said Cheng "went to bat for the company to help secure" public funds for employee recruitment and training from the Virginia Department of Business Assistance under the Virginia Jobs Investment Program.
In the end, Advance Auto brokered a deal for state and local monetary incentives. Those benefits will fall between $450,000 and $460,000, Whitaker said.
Advance Auto has agreed that the new jobs will pay average compensation above the city and region's median salary of $41,000, said Rob Ledger, Roanoke's economic development manager.
"That is what I call real economic development," Ledger said.
The headquarters of Advance Auto, which operates more than 3,600 stores, is inside the Crossroads Corporate Business Center, once a shopping mall. Without enlarging the building's footprint, Advance Auto has built offices in the former Waccamaw kitchen and home goods store, former Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles office and former Circuit City electronics shop. In the next phase, Advance will move into the former Jo-Ann Fabric, which left Crossroads last year, and occupy a total of 270,000 square feet of the former mall, or about 6 acres.
The $8 million outlay — for physical improvements, equipment and other unspecified growth — will come on top of $10 million spent by Advance at Crossroads since it first located some operations there in 2005, said Donna Broome, a company vice president.
Advance Auto has had years of strong profits. It is larger and more profitable than before the recession, having prospered as cautious Americans kept their vehicles longer and bought parts to keep them running.
Thursday, January 26th, 2012 at 9:11 am
General Electric's Salem plant announced Friday that an increased demand for wind turbine controls is driving the facility to add about 60 positions to its work force.
"Strong manufacturing demand and replacements for retiring employees are 
generating the need for additional employees," a news release from the company said.
The jobs are in production, electronics test inspection and industrial maintenance and pay from $15 to $25 per hour, according to human resources manager Peggy Scholzen.
The plant currently employs about 700 workers, Scholzen said. It manufactures control systems for GE Energy products including gas, steam and wind turbines, power plant and wind farm management and solar arrays.
The 60 positions at the plant are part of 200 jobs that GE has previously said it plans to add in Salem and at other GE locations in Virginia.
For more information on the positions at the Salem plant, visit www.geenergycontrolsjobs.com.
Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 8:41 pm
by roanoke.com
The team behind the Virginia Tech Lumenhaus has received a 2012 AIA Honor Award for Architecture from the American Institute of Architects.
This marks the first time a university team has been given the honor, according to the school.
The solar house, which was designed and built by faculty and students, provides all the amenities of a modern home while drawing no outside electricity.
In June 2010, the solar house won the Solar Decathlon Europe competition in Spain. It also received first place honors in the architecture category for that event.
The house is on the Tech campus and is open for tours by appointment.
Thursday, January 12th, 2012 at 11:38 am
ITT Exelis lays off about 300 at Roanoke Co. plant
Defense contractor ITT Exelis has laid off about 300 hourly workers from its Roanoke County plant.
The cuts come as the company, which manufactures night vision goggles and other military equipment, contends with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, and with a shrinking government defense budget, company spokesman Ken Darby said.
“It’s just an adjustment we have to make in our production output,” Darby said.
More job cuts are imminent, he said. An undisclosed number of salaried employees will be notified of layoffs by the end of the month, he said.
ITT employed about 1,400 before the layoffs.
A man who identified himself as the president of Local 82162 of the International Union of Electronic/Communications Workers of America, which represents workers at the plant, said he had no comment.
By Amanda Codispoti
Monday, January 9th, 2012 at 10:37 am
The recovery has picked up considerable steam in the Roanoke Region over the course of 2011. The most recent employment statistics by industry help shed light on growing sectors of the regional economy. Importantly, manufacturing saw slight growth last year, the first growth in the sector in more than five years.
After years of significant declines, information technology and telecommunications grew by approximately 1,700 jobs over the past year in the extended labor market area. Transportation and logistics, education and related services, and business services also experienced higher levels of growth each adding between 500 and 600 jobs.
Information technology, fabricated metal, agribusiness and food manufacturing, engineering, transportation and logistics, education, and plastics performed stronger locally, when compared to growth in the same industries at a national level. Several of these sectors were strong regionally prior to the recession and are recovering.
Meanwhile, finance, insurance, and real estate, a sector that grew during the first part of the economic slowdown, declined significantly as did government and public administration. Employment declined only slightly in healthcare and social assistance, energy, advanced manufacturing, and retail trade sectors.
Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at 6:12 pm
Virginia Tech unveiled their new supercomputer, HokieSpeed that is ranked at No. 96 on the list of top 500 super computers in the world and No. 11 on the 2011 Green500 list, which is ranked on energy efficiency.
Virginia Tech crashed the supercomputing arena in 2003 with System X, a machine that placed the university among the world’s top computational research facilities. Now comes HokieSpeed, a new supercomputer that is up to 22 times faster and yet a quarter of the size of X, boasting a single-precision peak of 455 teraflops, or 455 trillion operations per second, and a double-precision peak of 240 teraflops, or 240 trillion operations per second.
That’s enough computational capability to place HokieSpeed at No. 96 on the most recent Top500 List, the industry-standard ranking of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers. More intriguing is HokieSpeed’s energy efficiency, which ranks it at No. 11 in the world on the November 2011 Green500 List, a compilation of supercomputers that excel at using less energy to do more. On the Green500 List, HokieSpeed is the highest-ranked commodity supercomputer in the United States.
Located at Virginia Tech’s Corporate Research Center, HokieSpeed – the word “Hokie” originating from an old Virginia Tech sports cheer – contains 209 nodes, or separate computers, connected to one another in and across large metal racks, each roughly 6.5 feet tall, to create a single supercomputer that occupies half a row of racks in a vast university computer machine room. X took three times the rack space.
Read the rest of the story Here>>>
Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 at 9:00 am
Moody’s Analytics had a lot of promising things to say about the regional economy in its most recent report on economic performance. From discussions of a manufacturing revival to strong household credit, remarks from Moody’s Analytics portend a stronger recovery in the coming months.
Moody’s noted that the region’s short-term recovery is being led by gains in manufacturing, which, according to data from the Virginia Employment Commission, experienced its first sustained increases in more than five years. The small increase in manufacturing employment locally is significant because the area has experienced year-over-year declines in manufacturing sector employment since 2006. A year-over-year increase now signals stabilization and perhaps even the beginning of trend reversal. Moody’s provides the Roanoke Bar Division of Steel Dynamics as an example of how production is increasing locally, noting that the plant operated at 90 percent capacity in first quarter 2011, up from 75 percent in 2010 and 60 percent in the first quarter of 2009.
Household balance sheets are also stronger in Roanoke than in the state or the nation, according to Moody’s. The region experienced a muted housing boom cycle, leaving fewer homeowners with significant credit issues when the housing market crashed. A lack of local job growth earlier in the recovery dragged on retail and services tied strongly to consumer spending. With job growth improving (as shown by significant year-over-year employment increases in the second half of 2011) the fact that underlying credit conditions are stronger in Roanoke should lead to stronger retail/restaurant growth in the region.
Thursday, December 8th, 2011 at 9:06 am
Employment in the Roanoke Region continued its pattern of growth into October 2011. More than 900 jobs were added in the Roanoke Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) in a single month and more than 4,300 jobs have been added since October 2010. The unemployment rate in the MSA in October 2011 was 6.2 percent.
Roanoke is ranked 63rd in the nation in terms of having a low unemployment rate, putting it in the top 17 percent of all metros nationally. The Roanoke MSA’s unemployment rate continues to be lower than that of Lynchburg and Richmond, Virginia; Asheville, Piedmont Triad, and Charlotte, North Carolina, Knoxville, Tennessee, Chattanooga, Tennessee and many other competing southern metros.
Friday, December 2nd, 2011 at 10:10 am
A Roanoke doctor is using a $2.2 million federal grant to help with an area of medicine most bigger companies overlook.
Carilion Clinic's Doctor Andy Muelenaer develops pediatric devices. He is part of a team selected by the FDA to receive the grant money.
Dr. Muelenaer helped establish the Pediatric Medical Device Institute in 2004 and says his work is important because inventing children's devices is usually ignored. He says a reason for the overlook is that guaranteed profit is not there.
"Most large medical device companies won't even look at a device unless they can see a billion dollar per year return. For children, that is typically not the case," said Dr. Muelenaer.
Dr. Muelenaer will team up with a doctor from the University of Michigan to utilize the money, which will be used to identify pediatric needs and funding sources.
Thursday, November 10th, 2011 at 11:38 am
From Roanoke.com
New Energy Technologies Inc. and the city of Roanoke demonstrated an electricity-generating rumble strip last weekend at the Roanoke Civic Center.
Nearly 6000 visitors and 580 vehicles participated in the initial demonstration. The strips capture kinetic energy, which is then converted to electricity, when vehicles slow down or come to a stop on them.
Here’s a news release from New Energy Technologies:
New Energy Technologies, Inc. and the City of Roanoke, Virginia successfully debuted the Company’s latest MotionPower™-Express system, the world’s first-of-its-kind rumble strip, capable of generating sustainable electricity. The Civic Center debut marks the first of several test and demonstration events the Company plans to conduct in partnership with the City of Roanoke.
“The City of Roanoke takes seriously its responsibility to be good stewards of the environment and is always looking for unique ways to meet our mission of increased sustainability,” said Ken Cronin, Director of General Services/Sustainability for the City of Roanoke. “We are proud to be the first city in the nation to test this novel technology with the potential to make the way we produce energy more clean and green.”
Held last weekend at the Roanoke Civic Center, nearly 6000 visitors and over 580 vehicles participated in the demonstration event, with each driver activating New Energy’s patent pending MotionPower™-Express System. As drivers slowed down, or came to a stop, their vehicle tires depressed small rumble strip-like treadles, allowing for the capture of kinetic energy. This captured energy was converted to electricity, which powered a series of brightly illuminated lights displayed to drivers.
Engineering estimates show an optimized and installed MotionPower™ System experiencing a traffic pattern similar to the 6-hour event, could produce enough sustainable electricity to power lights for the average American home for an entire day. In commercial applications, the same electricity could power a 150 square foot sports-venue electronic billboard or marquee for an entire day.
“The MotionPower™-Express was safely demonstrated to over 580 vehicles attending events on Saturday,” said Robyn Schon, General Manager of the Roanoke Civic Center, managed by Global Spectrum, manager of over 100 public assembly venues around the world. “Visitors were excited to learn more about the technology and to help the City of Roanoke in its mission to implement green energy initiatives. “
”We applaud and thank the City of Roanoke for their vision and cooperation in making this a successful demonstration,” said John Conklin, President and CEO of New Energy Technologies, Inc. “I especially want to thank the hundreds drivers and thousands of participants who helped us green the City, one car at a time.”
MotionPower™-Express can be designed for a range of speeds based on traffic pattern and the amount of energy required for a specific application. These applications may include: sport and entertainment venues, solid waste transfer stations, fleet vehicle maintenance facilities, transportation depots, airports (passenger arrival and departure areas), parking lots, border crossings, exit ramps, neighborhoods with traffic calming zones, rest areas, toll booths, and travel plazas.
“MotionPower can offset the city’s cost of operating traffic control devices, such as traffic signals and street lights,” said Mark Jamison, City of Roanoke Manager of Transportation. “This innovative partnership with New Energy Technologies has the potential to provide a more sustainable environment, while simultaneously conserving strained budgets of cities across the nation.”
More than 250 million vehicles are registered in America and an estimated 6 billion miles are driven on our nation’s roads every day. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration nearly 70 percent of America’s electricity is generated by natural gas and coal. The environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions and the rising cost of those non-renewable fuels, along with the potential doubling of global electricity consumption in the coming years, require the urgent need for creative, sustainable methods of generating electricity. The prospect of sustainably converting vehicle motion and deceleration (vehicle energy) into electricity represents significant positive environmental impact and alternative energy opportunities.