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Developer shrugs off recession, plots all-solar Fla. city
Michael Burnham, Greenwire via NY Times
A Florida developer unveiled plans today to build the nation’s first solar-powered city — a cluster of homes, offices and factories less than 20 miles from Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast.
“Babcock Ranch” would be built on 17,000 acres in Charlotte and Lee counties, with more than half of the land set aside for nature preserves, agriculture and other open space. Florida Power & Light Co. would build a 75-megawatt solar photovoltaic array to supply electricity to the development’s 6 million square feet of residential, industrial and retail buildings.
The big question: If you build it in this economy, will buyers come?
Developer Syd Kitson is betting heavily that he is going to attract investors, businesses and 45,000 residents to his $2 billion ranch community, which he plans to start building next year. He is promising 19,500 homes, 20,000 permanent jobs, open spaces and plenty of carbon-free megawatts.
“Solar is just the first step,” Kitson told reporters in a Washington news conference today. “Babcock Ranch will be a true living laboratory of the new-energy economy … where innovative companies can design, build and use the renewable and efficient technologies that customers across the country and around the globe will need.”
(9 April 2009)
Is America’s love affair with the “exburbs” over?
Andy Sullivan, Reuters
… Though the recession has left few areas of the United States unscathed, the sprawling neighborhoods out on the far edges of the United States’ metropolitan areas have been especially hard-hit. Property values are falling, crime is rising, and the roads remain as congested as ever.
Some planners say the hard times are spurring a long-term shift away from the car-centric sprawl that has defined increasing swaths of the landscape since World War Two.
Rising prices for transportation and home heating, the declining number of two-parent households with children and a growing disillusionment with long commutes will prompt more Americans to choose smaller housing within walking distance of shops and mass transit, they say.
In this scenario, some of today’s developments intended for aspiring middle-class families could become tomorrow’s slums, warehousing those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.
(10 April 2009)
Sustainability a growing movement at colleges, universities across Canada
The Canadian Press
Sustainability is quickly seeping into every crevice of campus life at some colleges and universities in Canada and each year they’re churning out reams of green graduates schooled in the ways of environmental building.
But true sustainability in construction, engineering and energy isn’t going to come about by just dedicating one program to it, say staff, faculty and students – it’s about a way of thinking.
Bob Emptage, the dean of technology, environment and apprenticeship at Georgian College, based in Barrie, Ont., said to achieve sustainability students must be taught to incorporate it into every step of the building design and construction process.
… David Elfstrom studied sustainable building and design at Fleming College, based in Peterborough, Ont., in 2006. He had previously studied civil engineering then worked in medical physics for almost 10 years.
“After learning about peak oil and seeing the documentary ‘End of Suburbia’ I decided I needed to do something,” Elfstrom said.
… “The choice I thought about at the time was, ‘Maybe I could go learn organic farming, organic agriculture, or oh, wait a second – I have this engineering degree. Maybe I can use that.”‘
(9 April 2009)
