Babcock Ranch, the city that tamed hurricanes in Florida

The energy community born in the early 2000s has become a safe haven in Florida exposed to the threat of hurricanes, thanks to efficient planning based on innovation and renewable sources.

A few days have passed since the passage of Hurricane Milton but the center of Babcock Ranch, twenty kilometers inland from Fort Myers, Florida, is teeming with life.The inhabitants of this energy community as big as Manhattan they wander the streets wandering here and there among the food trucks of the "Ranch nite", an evening of outdoor events organized to enjoy the clear weather.No one would know that, just a few days earlier, Babcock Ranch came face to face with what local meteorologists feared might prove to be the most powerful hurricane of the last century.

Hurricane Milton has ruined (almost) everything

A destructive power such as to disturb even the expert John Morales, which has been analyzing hurricanes for years.Live on CNN, he couldn't hold back tears as his calculations provided scientific proof of how quickly the hurricane was accumulating energy, largely due to rising water surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico.Many have hypothesized that it could make it necessary to create an unprecedented category 6 in the Saffir-Simpson scale, which measures the intensity of tropical cyclones from 1 to 5.In the end, Milton was less devastating than expected, also thanks to the massive deployment of forces deployed to persuade the population to leave the areas most at risk.However, the winds reached 185 kilometers per hour and caused the death of at least 16 people in Florida alone flooding cities like Sarasota, where the water reached 3 meters high.

But in Babcock Ranch, where only in 2017 the first residents began to live exploiting the'solar energy of the nearby 150 megawatt photovoltaic park owned by Florida Power&Light (Fpl), the damage was not visible beyond a few trees uprooted and traffic lights falling to the ground.The wetland on which houses, shops, schools and all types of buildings stand has not been distorted by the construction plans, preserving its natural function which makes this area a perfect example of symbiosis between land and water.This is why the earth here has not opened up into chasms capable of swallowing anything, including cars whole.At Babcock Ranch, on the contrary, theelectricity has never failed, and with it also drinking water and internet connection.

A shelter for the population threatened by hurricanes

This isn't the first time Babcock Ranch has successfully braved hurricanes.The downtown Field House, the heart of city life, first hosted about 500 evacuees during Hurricane Ian, which passed over the community as a Category 4 storm in 2022.After Ian, communities surrounding Babcock Ranch experienced an estimated $115 billion in both insured and uninsured losses, but the city suffered little damage.

By virtue of this resistance to extreme climatic events, the result of efficient planning and the optimization of energy supply systems, Babcock Ranch is today a safe haven in case of hurricanes.Each structure can withstand winds of up to 240 kilometers per hour, while the underground infrastructure that connects the solar farm to the buildings means the community rarely loses electricity.Almost all the electricity consumed depends on the sun.When this isn't enough, it is produced by a gas plant, a mix that the manufacturers have defined as the cleanest that can be found in the United States.A few hours before Milton reached land, at least 2,000 Floridians have found refuge there, being deployed  to two buildings designated as shelters by the Florida Division of Emergency Management.Four hundred people were hosted in a school, while a sports facility held 1,600.

Many came from nearby Fort Myers, on the coast, which received a mandatory evacuation order from the state government:“Babcock Ranch has saved many lives in some areas that have become very dangerous,” he told the New York Times Syd Kitson, who founded the city in 2006.The former football player turned entrepreneur has purchased 380 square kilometers of land near Fort Myers to make it a great eco-sustainable project.Three hundred square kilometers were sold to the state of Florida to make it a natural area, the Babcock Ranch Preserve, which protects water resources, diverse wildlife habitats, scenic landscapes, and historic and cultural resources in the Southwest Florida corridor.In the remaining portion of the territory, a solar park with 700,000 panels, which represents the real "engine" of the community and the actual city, which today has around 50,000 inhabitants:“Mother Nature will prevail every time,” Kitson continues.“What we try to do is mitigate this risk as much as possible and make our community as resilient as possible.”

The innovation of Babcock Ranch, cleaned and made into a system 

To carry forward the Babcock Ranch project - whose completion is expected by 2035 - the collaboration of Fpl, the third largest electricity company in the United States with more than 4.8 million customers, which after Babcock Ranch has decided to initiate other projects to grow solar capacity throughout Florida.

Everything built on this green, muddy platform speaks the language of innovation:the street lighting is entrusted to a network of solar panels capable of conserving energy for the night, all the houses are equipped with optical fiber which allows the inhabitants to carry out community-related services such as paying bills, using public transport public or the management of your own medical records thanks to thecity ​​app.Home automation is highly developed and everyone is allowed to install solar panels to sell energy through a smart grid.Also the water system is managed sustainably:one was in fact designed recovery network of white waste water from showers and sinks to then be used for the irrigation of lawns and green areas of the city.

The boldest innovation is to bring social equity back to the center

However, living in Babcock Ranch is still a privilege reserved for few due to the high costs.Most home prices range between $300 and $4 million.In Florida, the average home price is almost $400,000.The challenge, in the medium term, is bring greater social equity maintaining the approach to innovation and respect for the environment that has made Babcock Ranch a paradigm of eco-sustainability at a national and international level, acting as an example for many other projects.The same challenge that would lead politics to put the emphasis on prevention rather than on the costly chase to patch up the damage caused by extreme weather events.A modus operandi that has caused huge economic losses, pushing numerous insurance companies to withdraw from the market in the areas most affected by extreme events.By reducing these costs, which were estimated at only for Hurricane Milton 100 billion dollars, it would avoid unloading the burden of reconstruction on public finances and, consequently, also on the citizens of Florida, especially the most vulnerable.