Planned Florida City to be Solar-Self-Sufficient
Filed Under: Environmental News on April 18, 2009
The new city will be called Babcock Ranch and will be located near Fort Myers, Florida. Florida Power & Light plans to spend $350 million to build a 75-megawatt photovoltaic power plant at the city. The city is planned to begin construction later this year.
The largest PV plant currently in operation is the 60MW plant in Spain, so this could potentially become the world’s largest solar PV plant.
The plant itself will be inside the city while the solar panels will be dispersed throughout the town, on rooftops everywhere. The city is being planned by Kitson & Partners and will also include 100% wireless Internet coverage, and several clean-tech features for water and sewer.
The planned city will have about six million square feet of retail, commercial and office space as well as civic and industrial. The entire project will cost at least $2 billion to complete and will include 19,500 homes.
This should be interesting. Read more about it on their website.
Update: Looks like it was too good to be true. Florida is clamping down on incentives, so the money won’t be there for the place to be built, it seems. Oh well.
So where will this community get their energy when the sun doesn’t shine?