[ The Babcock Ranch community near Ft Meyers shows building a
resilient and low-carbon America will save both money and lives. We
need to start now.]
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WHY BABCOCK RANCH SURVIVED HURRICANE IAN BUT OTHERS FLORIDA CITIES
DIDN’T  
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Thom Hartmann
October 3, 2022
The Hartmann Report
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_ The Babcock Ranch community near Ft Meyers shows building a
resilient and low-carbon America will save both money and lives. We
need to start now. _

, Image by 이룬 봉 from Pixabay

 

The media is all over the story that Governor DeSantis was notified
that the danger threshold for evacuation was hit on Sunday, but he
waited until Tuesday to order one (leaving a trail of dead bodies in
his wake).

[Twitter avatar for @DWUhlfelderLaw]Daniel Uhlfelder @DWUhlfelderLaw
[[link removed]]

Hundreds of dead bodies found in Lee County, Florida. DeSantis stands
by decision to wait until day before landfall to order evacuations in
Lee County. H/t ⁦@SarahBurris⁩ ⁦@Acosta⁩
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October 2nd 2022
[[link removed]]  3,466
Retweets7,005 Likes
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But there’s another story out of Florida — a good news story —
that’s not getting anything close to the coverage it deserves.

JUST 12 MILES NORTHEAST OF FORT MEYERS — A COMMUNITY DEVASTATED BY
THE HURRICANE WITH TOTAL LOSS OF POWER, WATER, AND MASSIVE LOSS OF
LIFE — ANOTHER COMMUNITY NOT ONLY CAME THROUGH THE HURRICANE JUST
FINE BUT NEVER EVEN LOST POWER.

If you’ve been watching the coverage, you know by now that much of
the loss of life in Florida was in Lee County. What you may not know
is that the Babcock Ranch community — a small town, really, partly
in Lee County — not only suffered only minimal damage but is now a
refuge for people displaced by the storm.

When groundbreaking for Babcock Ranch — Florida’s first 100%
solar-powered community with over 700,000 panels providing more than
enough electricity for all 2000 homes — happened in 2015
[[link removed]],
it wasn’t a bunch of environmentally-minded old hippies putting the
project together. In fact, the community — like the region around it
— tends to vote solidly red.

It wasn’t to save the world that they built an all-electric,
all-solar community: it was to avoid exactly what happened to the
surrounding area; electric and water outages and the collapse of
infrastructure that typically accompanies a hurricane.

In 2010 it cost around $6/watt to install residential solar with
batteries (just the solar panels themselves were around
[[link removed]] $2/watt), so a
typical home’s system cost between $40,000 and $60,000.

Today it’s around
[[link removed]] $1.40/watt (the
panels themselves are now around
[[link removed]] $.38/watt) and
not only is the price typically below $20,000 but there are huge
federal incentives to make the systems even cheaper.

Solar and wind are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity in the
United States. This is why over a quarter-million Americans
today earn [[link removed]] their
living installing and maintaining solar and wind systems.

[[link removed]]

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Babcock Ranch designed their homes with a low wind profile and the
houses were set far enough above the streets that the streets
themselves are designed to flood (and run off) leaving the homes high
and dry. Power and internet lines are buried and using native plants
as landscaping helped to catch and slow runoff to minimize flood
damage.

WHICH IS WHY BABCOCK RANCH HOMES CAME THROUGH HURRICANE IAN LARGELY
INTACT AND ITS SOLAR-POWERED SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY CENTER IS NOW FULL
OF REFUGEES FROM NEARBY TOWNS.

While Babcock Ranch is an upscale
[[link removed]] community with homes in the
half-million to million-dollar (and up) range, that’s because it’s
larger homes on big lots, rather than the result of the community’s
hurricane-proof design and super-resilient solar power system.

These resilience aspects should be a model for all of Florida — and
the rest of the country that experiences floods, derechos, and
hurricanes — starting right now. This isn’t rocket science and
it’s about the same price as throwing up stick houses that’ll
simply explode or get washed away in the next storm: when you add in
the reduced cost and increased reliability of electricity and other
essential services, it’s cheaper than typical construction over the
life of the homes.

THERE ARE EVEN INNOVATIVE ECONOMIC MODELS ALREADY ADOPTED BY OTHER
COUNTRIES WE COULD USE TO RAPIDLY PROPAGATE SOLAR ACROSS THE UNITED
STATES AS PART OF AN EFFORT TO HARDEN OUR ELECTRIC SYSTEMS.

In September, 2009 I was invited to join German Member of Parliament
Herman Scheer to give presentations at a conference
[[link removed]] (page 11) put on at
the _Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
[[link removed]]_ in Spain. 

ALMOST A DECADE EARLIER, SCHEER HAD SHEPHERDED HIS “100,000
ROOFTOPS” PROGRAM THROUGH THE GERMAN PARLIAMENT AND WAS EAGER TO
TALK ABOUT HOW IT WORKED AND COULD WORK IN SPAIN.

We talked at length about his program (his presentation was
brilliant), which, in his original idea (which was only partially
implemented; there were tons of compromises, most having to do with
Russia) was elegantly simple.

By the 1990s, Germany was facing an energy crisis of sorts: people
were freaked out about the nation’s nuclear plants and wanted them
shut down. For good reason, it turns out.  

BACK IN 1986 ON MY BIRTHDAY, MAY 7TH, I FLEW INTO FRANKFURT TO
FINALIZE MY WORK VISA TO MOVE MY FAMILY TO GERMANY FOR THE FOLLOWING
THIRTEEN MONTHS (WE MOVED IN JUNE).  IT WAS A GRAY, RAINY DAY WHEN I
WALKED OUT OF THE _HAUPTBAHNHOF_ (MAIN TRAIN STATION) IN DOWNTOWN
FRANKFURT TO WALK A BLOCK OR TWO TO MY FAVORITE HOTEL.

I was shocked to see the city I’d visited so many times completely
empty of pedestrians and nearly drained of cars.

AT THE HOTEL, THE CLERK WAS FRANTIC TO TAKE MY WET HAT AND RAINCOAT
AND SEND THEM TO THE HOTEL’S LAUNDRY.  “CHERNOBYL MELTED DOWN TWO
WEEKS AGO,” HE TOLD ME, “AND THE CLOUD WITH THE RADIATION IS RIGHT
ABOVE US NOW.  YOU MUST GO TAKE A SHOWER IMMEDIATELY!” 

As I learned living in rural northwest West Germany for the rest of
that year and most of 1987, all of Germany was as flipped out as the
hotel clerk. 

I’d brought a hand-held Geiger counter with me when we moved, and
walking through the rural supermarkets it’d occasionally click
rapidly, particularly when I passed local mushrooms or meat. That
would always draw a crowd (and dirty stares from the shopkeepers!).

And I wasn’t the only one walking around with a Geiger counter: the
German government had to change the acceptable standard for radiation
in milk, and people were constantly finding “hot” radioactive
particles from Chernobyl in the nearby forests.

GERMANS WANTED TO GET RID OF THEIR NUCLEAR POWER, BUT HOW?  THEY
DIDN’T WANT TO REVERT TO MORE COAL OR OIL POWER; THAT’S WHY
THEY’D GONE TO NUCLEAR IN THE FIRST PLACE.

So Scheer’s original proposal, as he laid out the concept to me, was
simple and elegant.  

Banks would loan people the money to put rooftop solar on their houses
at a super-low interest rate, with defaults backstopped by the
government.  No risks, in other words, to the banks.

Power utilities would buy surplus power from those homes at a
“feed-in tariff” rate that was higher than the retail price of
electricity until their bank loans were paid off (typically 5-10
years).

THE TARIFFS WERE SET SO, FOR EXAMPLE, IF THE MONTHLY PAYMENTS ON YOUR
LOAN FOR YOUR ROOFTOP SOLAR SYSTEM WERE $100, THE LOCAL UTILITY WOULD
BE PAYING YOU (OR REDUCING YOUR NORMAL ELECTRIC BILL) BY AROUND $100 A
MONTH AS THAT “FEED IN TARIFF.”

THE TARIFF PAYMENTS WOULD LAST UNTIL YOUR LOAN WAS PAID OFF: IN
EFFECT, YOU’D GET THE SOLAR SYSTEM, WHICH WILL LAST FOR DECADES, FOR
FREE.

What the utilities got out of it was immediate expansion of their
power-generating sources at no expense to them whatsoever. They
didn’t have to build expensive new power plants: the nation’s
houses and office buildings would provide that.

As more and more homes came online, the power that was then being
generated by nuclear plants would be replaced by electricity from the
“100,000 rooftops” AND THE EXTRA EXPENSE TO THE UTILITIES FOR THE
FEED-IN TARIFFS WOULD STILL COST LESS THAN BUILDING A NEW POWER PLANT,
BE IT NUCLEAR OR FOSSIL FUEL-POWERED.  

Everybody wins economically, the government handles the risk by
backstopping the banks and utilities (and it’s a minor expense for a
national government), and Germany gets off its growing nuclear power
addiction.

Scheer got the feed-in tariffs passed in 1999
[[link removed]] as
part of his 100,000 Rooftops program
[[link removed]],
followed by the German Renewable Energy Act of 2000
[[link removed]]. 
It wasn’t implemented as simply and elegantly as I’ve described
here and as he shared with me over lunch in Barcelona (politics
intervened, of course, leading to imports of Russian natural gas), but
it got a long way there.

Other countries around the world copied parts of his program, although
some of Germany’s for-profit and regional utilities were committed
to sabotaging it
[[link removed]] and
have had some successes in that effort since his untimely death at age
66 in 2010. 

And in most parts of the world — and most all of the USA — solar
works even better than in Germany, which is the cloudiest country 
[[link removed]]in
Europe and at the same latitude as Calgary
[[link removed]].
The science proving this can work even better in the US
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both solid and irrefutable.

TODAY, AS A RESULT OF SCHEER’S VISIONARY LEADERSHIP TWO DECADES AGO,
OVER A MILLION GERMAN HOMES HAVE BOTH SOLAR PANELS AND BATTERY
STORAGE, AND THE COUNTRY IS UPGRADING THEIR SYSTEM TO A “SMART
GRID” TO HANDLE IT ALL. THERE’S AN ABSOLUTELY AMAZING COLLECTION
OF CHARTS AND GRAPHS EXPLAINING IT ALL HERE
[[link removed]].

ADDITIONALLY, THEY WERE SHUTTING DOWN THEIR LAST NUKE (IT’S ON HOLD
BECAUSE OF THE UKRAINE CRISIS), AND BEGINNING THE PROCESS OF PHASING
OUT COAL
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slowdowns on renewables are causing them to have to default to natural
gas in a few places). 

AS THE MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW NOTES
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“THE COUNTRY AVOIDED PUMPING ABOUT 74 MILLION METRIC TONS OF CARBON
DIOXIDE INTO THE ATMOSPHERE IN 2009. THE GERMAN ENVIRONMENT MINISTRY
ALSO TOUTS A SIDE BENEFIT: NEARLY 300,000 NEW JOBS IN CLEAN POWER.”

Milton Friedman, the godfather of “disaster capitalism,” was fond
of pointing out that most people and most countries would only
consider significant changes to the way they do things in the face of
a crisis.

We’re there, now.

Today’s crises in Florida and Puerto Rico should kick-start an
entirely new generation of building codes and energy systems that can
quickly go nationwide.

Much of the work has already been done by California, which mandated
in 2018 that most new construction must have solar
[[link removed]] rooftops
starting in 2020 and recently updated
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tightened their standards for 2022.

Building a resilient and low-carbon America will save both money and
lives. We need to start now.

_NY Times bestselling author 34 books in 17 languages & nation's #1
progressive radio host. Psychotherapist, international relief worker.
Politics, history, spirituality, psychology, science, anthropology,
pre-history, culture, and the natural world._

* Hurricane Ian
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* community destruction
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* Renewable energy
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* resiliency
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