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Much hullabaloo has been made about Babcock Ranch’s status as the first solar city.
But Sept. 28’s Hurricane Ian illustrated that the innovations of the emerging town, which sold 934 homes last year at the Lee and Charlotte county line, go well beyond that.
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The community was among the honored at this week’s Edison Awards, the 36th annual gathering of some of Earth’s top senior business and government executives, academics and inventors at Caloosa Sound Convention Center in Fort Myers. Along with its developer Kitson & Partners, it was also recognized at an Aspen Institute climate conference last month.
“Until last September, we were known as America’s first solar-powered town — 700,000 panels on about 840 acres,” CEO Syd Kitson said. “But then came Hurricane Ian, and the focus shifted for us from renewable energy and sustainability to resiliency.”
That “Resilience in Design” of the now 5,000-resident Babcock Ranch led to the Edison Award.
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Babcock’s results are “significant, and it relates to this notion of safety, protection, general public — these forces coming together,” said Edison Awards host and former tech CEO Andrea Kates, who advises some of the globe’s largest and key enterprises on five continents including Ford, Top 20 world contractor Japan-based Shimizu and Stanford University-based efforts.
“Ian put all that preparation, all that hard work and planning, everything, to the ultimate test,” Kitson said. “I gotta tell ya, I’m sitting in my house, and it was like this perpetual freight train running right through us, and it just seemed like it was never, never going to end. But throughout this relentless storm, Babcock Ranch residents never lost power, they never lost water, and they never lost internet. And when the storm was over, and they emerged from their homes, they discovered that they were living in a community that had little to no damage.”
The future and the execution of concepts to come are what’s at the heart of the Edison Awards, named after Southwest Florida winter resident and global whiz Thomas Alva Edison, who lived about a mile from this downtown event and died in 1931. Established in 1987 in New York City, the confab of some of the planet’s greatest minds wrapped up Friday, the third time it’s been held locally.
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With constant hurricane threats, are Babcock investments worth it?
More than 150 entities from 23 countries received international honors for “game changing” products and services in more than 50 categories including aerospace and flight, military tech, virtual reality, robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, biotech, 5G, cyber threat advancements, health care, personal technology, wearable devices and transportation. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger and Sir Jonathan Ive, co-founder of LoveForm and mastermind behind Apple’s most iconic products, received the 2023 Edison Achievement Award.
“The prestigious Edison Awards not only recognizes world-changing innovations, but also the brilliant minds behind them,” said Frank Bonafilia, executive director of the awards. “Our 2023 Edison Award finalists have found and created game-changing solutions to live safer, healthier and more productive lives. (Every) year we are blown away by the companies from around the world that are solving critical issues with innovative solutions. We are recognizing modern-day Thomas Edisons and hope that they will inspire future generations of inventors.”
A panel of more than 3,000 senior industries execs and scholars from around the world did the judging, based on the four criteria of concept, value, delivery and impact. The judges found that “Babcock Ranch is making the case for more resilient design and construction to withstand the forces of nature. Babcock Ranch is built upon core values, with storm safety protocols and best practices proven successful once again by Hurricane Ian.”
Those core initiatives, according to Kitson’s Lucienne Pears, vice-president of economic and business development in Babcock: Environment, health, education, energy, technology, transportation, recreation and last, but certainly not least, storm safety.
“Kitson & Partners are really looking at this really huge problem, or opportunity is probably a way better way to say it, of everybody being in a place to live, (a) safe, secure, quality structure to live, to raise their families in,” Pears said. “We committed a lot of bucks. (How) can major national homebuilders embrace innovation more and then put it out into the market place?”
Kitson concurs.
“Does this cost more? Well, yes it does, and it’s a great investment. The cost is nominal compared to the loss of property, the loss of productivity and the loss of life. And we hope to inspire other developers and communities to understand the value of investing in resiliency,” Kitson said. “A new town and the environment can work hand-in-hand. (We) believe we could execute these initiatives through innovation, becoming a living laboratory and an incubator for new ideas.”
The bottom line, as Pears sees it: “Leveraging infrastructure innovation to promote economic growth” as the town moves to a projected 20,000 homes, 55,000 residents and six million square feet of commercial space in Babcock, where housing starts in the $200,000 range.
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What lessons can be learned from Hurricane Ian and Babcock efforts?
Working with numerous partners, the Kitson group “took every innovation that they could find, and we’re talking about different types of PVC pipings. We’re talking about different ways in treating the wastewater in a home. What are the different soil components, landscaping materials, insulation factors, crop tech? Pile it all into these homes,” Pears said. “We created this platform (of) critically important topics that are to be addressed.”
Storm water, that turned out to be a source of so much Florida damage with Ian, was key among those for Babcock.
“We went back and started looking at maps from 1940 to find the natural flow ways and then design a comprehensive water management system that mimics the way Mother Nature has been doing it for centuries,” Kitson said. The “storm water ponds and lakes have multiple points of interconnection and have a smart storm order management system, brand new technology.”
The “Smart Ponds” concept came through a partnership with the National Stormwater Trust, also known as NST.
It’s “a stormwater system that’s really smart, provides redundancy, works in complement with the natural environment and flow ways, actually depends on those flow ways as a backup system,” Pears said.” We all know it doesn’t rain equally across every square foot of land so there has to be some equalization of that. So we’re able to see, that for example, during Ian, if it’s raining in the ponds on the west side of Babcock Ranch and they’re filling up more quickly than the ponds on the east side for some reason, we know when that (will) be breached.”
The ponds are connected to live weather forecast data and use that information to project water levels and, if necessary, automatically lower water levels before a storm arrives even if the sun is still shining, NST co-founder Jeff Littlejohn said. Although a pond can actively drain itself to increase its flood storage capacity, stormwater managers oversee its performance and even can remotely control the pond.
“Our primary focus is on improving water quality,” LIttlejohn said. “But when a storm of that size is headed towards Florida, our objective shifts to protecting our communities and the environment from the flooding impacts of stormwater.”
Now, the groups are looking at lessons learned from Ian, Pears said.
“The freedom to try to pilot new ideas and putting them in existing ecosystems has been critically important. Hurricane Ian gave us the opportunity to look at a whole lot of water and what does that look like, and it creates a thought process in our head of what next? Is it more, what if it’s stronger, what if it’s longer, all of the things,” Pears said. “Now that we can understand those links and those relationships to each other, how can we affect that so that we can further improve the water management.”
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That resolve by the nation’s No. 5 fastest-selling residential community is part of what drew a Midwest builder to the 18,000-acre Babcock’s second major phase known as Midtown, which is under construction.
“We like the sustainability and solar power aspects and the energy efficiency requirements, which is something we take pride in,” said Chad Peterson, division manager for William Ryan Homes, a Chicago-based company making its first foray into the Southwest Florida market. “Babcock Ranch is forward-thinking, and we are appreciative to be part of it.”
The firm plans 476 single-family homes with a community pool, playground and event lawn for food trucks and movie nights. Midtown brings six new neighborhoods including the town’s first targeting the 55+ crowd by Toll Brothers with 485 abodes. A 3.5-mile Curry Creek linear park will integrate six smaller parks, pavilions, gardens and observation areas, and a new central gathering place will feature a mixed-use town center with dining, offices, shops and apartments within a 7-acre village green to go with its original Founder’s Square downtown district.
Babcock also has been at work ahead of the next major storm, serving as a test site for a collaboration involving Pulte Homes and Ford Motor Company, which is experimenting with an electric truck’s backup power feature and has been able to use a vehicle battery to energize a two-story, 3,654-square-foot five-bedroom home. It has the potential to keep a house running for three days or more during an outage, the companies said.
“As a living laboratory, (Babcock) gives us the opportunity to test sustainability from different perspectives, including advanced electric vehicle technology as a solution for backup emergency power to homes,” said Josh Graeve, president of Pulte’s Southwest Florida Division. “There’s incredible potential for creating a critical lifeline for homeowners during natural disasters.”
That Ford pickup truck, the F-150 Lightning, is key in another Edison Award this week for a group known as SK On, which developed the world’s first NCM battery, also known as Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide, with a nickel content of nearly 90%. With the first mass-produced NCM9 batteries installed in those vehicles, the judges noted the “enhanced capacity, better safety, higher performance and increased cost-effectiveness than other NCM batteries.”
The Edison Awards also named its half-dozen 2023 Lewis Latimer Fellows, as part of a second year fellowship program named after a principal Thomas Edison collaborator that “is a bespoke, innovation curiosity sandbox, designed to inspire, connect, accelerate and enable Black thought leaders with world-shifting ideas.”
They include: Actor and rapper Shameik Moore, who is launching a new e-commerce platform designed to build economic and cultural development in African-American communities; and Lisa Dyson, founder of biotech company Kiverdi and Air Protein, a NASA-inspired technology that converts elements in the air into sustainable protein.
Based at the Naples Daily News, Columnist Phil Fernandez (pfernandez@gannett.com), who grew up living next to the Edison and Ford Winter Estates, writes In the Know as part of the USA TODAY NETWORK. Support Democracy and subscribe to a newspaper.
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