Can you build an entire town off-the-grid? Babcock Ranch wants to find out

BABCOCK RANCH, Florida—About a decade ago, NFL lineman-turned-real estate developer Syd Kitson began to have a vision. Fiber-optic Internet fed into every home. Self-driving cars ferried kids back-and-forth from school. A great blue sea of solar panels stretched to a horizon line of pines, soaked up rays in the Sunshine State.

Kitson wanted to turn the abandoned land he saw around him in Southwest Florida into a sort of future town, a place running entirely on the latest and greatest in energy-efficient technology. So in 2006, Kitson purchased 91,000 acres of mostly undeveloped agricultural land just 15 miles northeast of Fort Myers. He named the development Babcock Ranch, honoring the family who sold it to him.

There’s never been a shortage of real estate developers wanting to capitalize on Florida, of course. Yet Kitson promised his town would be different, better because it would be as sustainable as possible. When media outlets (ABC, CBS) eventually saw it, they dubbed Babcock Ranch America’s “first solar-powered town.”

Reality quickly set in, however. When the housing bubble infamously burst—roughly just over a year after Kitson closed the deal—Babcock Ranch seemed more like an image in fever dream than an epiphany. But today after a decade of delays, the Kitson vision is taking shape. Last year, Florida Power and Light (FPL) installed a 75-megawatt solar facility adjacent to the property. The town’s first residents moved in this January. And with the completion of its small but well-equipped downtown, Babcock Ranch finally has its grand opening scheduled for March.

Cruisin’ a green town at 10mph

On an overcast afternoon in January, Kitson and I climbed onboard the town’s new autonomous electric minibus on its inaugural day. Developed by French transportation company Transdev, the PACE system (short for, personalized, autonomous, connected, electric) starts the bus off at a cautious crawl and never exceeds 10 mph as it ferries us around downtown. A Transdev operator joins us on the ride, hovering over a control panel and monitoring the navigation system for any sign that it’s lost GPS signal.

“We’re designing [the town] around stuff like this,” Kitson said. “We don’t want cars around, or parking around.”

Today’s truth differs a bit. Cars are allowed and parking spaces are all around. Many of the first Babcock Ranch homes come with a one or two-car garage equipped with an optional charging station. But Kitson has a habit of speaking about his dream in extremes, which is often the case with someone selling something ambitious.

Transportation creature comforts aside, Kitson has shrugged off most real estate conventions in his plan for Babcock Ranch. Immediately after purchasing the 91,000-acre Babcock property, he sold 74,000 acres of it to the state in a record-setting land preservation deal supported by a number of environmental groups across Florida. He then bisected the remaining 18,000 acres. Half of it he’d turn into green space—parks, community gardens, and hiking trails. The other half he’d sell as plots for homes to independent builders.

Not much construction has been done to date. There are a handful of commercial buildings downtown—among them a restaurant, school, and health center that’s nearly complete—but the 19,500 planned homes are apparent in their absence, like a bunch of empty seats at a baseball game. Just about 20 houses have been built and only a couple of those are occupied. For now Babcock Ranch is as visually underwhelming as it is conceptually grand.

As the minibus drove through the streets that Friday, Kitson pointed out green metal sculptures branching upward, topped with solar panels tilted toward the Sun. These solar trees boast a peak capacity to power a few homes but hardly an entire town. “We want to get off the grid,” he said. And for that he needed a fully equipped solar farm.

But desiring self-sufficiency and building the infrastructure needed to make it happen are two very different things, especially in Florida where laws let utility companies keep homeowners tethered to the grid.

When Kitson wanted to set up his own electric utility in 2014, he was blocked by the local utility cooperative who said the deal would be bad for consumers. Lucky for him, years earlier he’d donated a bunch of land from the Babcock property to FPL as an incentive to build a solar farm next-door and pump clean energy its way. The 75-megawatt facility was completed last year.

“We gave them 440 acres,” Kitson said, “and they put in more than 340,000 panels.” Now, he says he’s urging FPL to put in a power storage facility, which the company deemed too expensive. Until then Babcock Ranch must rely on natural gas to power the town when the sun doesn’t shine.

Beyond the solar trees, Babcock Ranch is designed with a few other flourishes that show off its environmental credentials to potential residents. There’s an outfitter store downtown that sells outdoorsy Babcock Ranch merch and activewear. And all the town’s commercial buildings are topped with an array of solar panels, which serve more as accessories than essential power generators given the FPL facility less than two miles away.

That isn’t to say Babcock Ranch is superficially green. It was built to be sustainable from the bottom up and those principles have filtered into almost every aspect of the development, sometimes more authentically than others. There’s a farm-to-table restaurant, native-plant landscaping, and a network of irrigation canals designed to reduce the town’s environmental impact by reestablishing natural flow ways.

At the Babcock Neighborhood School, students are taught a “green-STEAM” curriculum with an emphasis on sustainability and environmental responsibility. For instance: a group of the school’s sixth graders proudly displayed their first place prize from a recent local cook-off, where they made chicken teriyaki in a DIY Fresnel solar cooker.

But Kitson doesn’t want to settle on sustainable. He wants to build a town that buzzes with all the latest technologies, which means adding them to his plan before they’ve been technically proven.

“Use us as a living laboratory for these great technologies,” he said, motioning towards the Trandev operator, whose eyes were locked on the navigation screen, ready to pounce on the manual controls the moment a problem reared its head amidst the head honcho.

Kitson hopes someday soon an operator won’t be needed. He talks about developing an app that people can use to summon the bus for point-to-point transport and a telehealth service that will transmit physicians from the health center directly into the resident’s home.

But it’s said that each new technology begets a new set of accidents, and self-driving shuttle buses are no different. As we rounded a corner back to the main square, Kitson’s eyes widened as the GPS signal dropped and the operator seized the controls to steer us safely to our drop-off point. “You’ve got three days to get that right,” Kitson said, either to the bus or its human overseer, laughing but also serious. (I checked back a few weeks later and the bus still had an operator, who admitted to some continued navigation issues.)

Babcock Ranch also has a lot of development ahead. Not only are it’s homes few and far between, but without a storage facility Kitson is only half way towards his solar energy goals. And, despite the town’s environmental claims, some wildlife groups still worry that Babcock Ranch is building on habitat that could help support endangered species like the Florida panther, while the bustling development could one day attract less sustainable sprawl to the undisturbed land nearby.

But Kitson insists that if he hadn’t purchased the Babcock property, someone else would have and they would’ve probably paved it all over and put a gate out front. Again, Kitson is quick to note he sold a lot of land back to the state and, in doing so, saved tens-of-thousands of acres from new development—even if he kept a big slice of it aside to build his dream town.

“This is a new town,” Kitson said. “Not a gated community like you get all over Florida… There are 1,000 people moving into Florida each day and in my view we need to start doing development right with sustainable and smart growth. We want to become that example for how to think about development in the future.”

Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. His stories about science and technology have appeared at Vice, Quartz, and, of course, here at Ars. He rambles and runs for fun. If not online, you can find him in the kitchen, at the farm, or on the dance floor.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1262589