Remote Florida site eyed for new green town

THE FUTURE SITE OF SKY, Fla. -- Homes here could be heated or cooled using the Earth's natural underground temperature. Appliances would be run by solar-powered batteries. Houses would be oriented to avoid the summer sun.

And everyone could grow some of their own food in the garden each house will have or in community orchards. If all goes as planned, the 600 families in this proposed Florida Panhandle town will lessen the carbon they spew into the atmosphere by walking just about everywhere they go, except maybe work or school.

"You've got almost a zero-carbon footprint just by living here," said Bruce White, one of the developers of the town, who envisions creating the climate steward's dream community. "Just by being here you will be an environmentalist."

Part of a growing $12 billion a year sustainable building industry, Sky is meant to be the green town of the future -- the way Americans will live when they realize they use too much energy, its developers say. They hope it will serve as an experiment into what can be done to accomplish that goal, and maybe be a model for other communities.

Right now, it's mostly pine trees, grassy meadow, creeks and scattered gladiolus flowers -- which were grown commercially on the property by the previous owner.

It may be in one of the last places you'd expect to find a mecca of green building, along a backroad in remote and rural Calhoun County. It's a half hour from the nearest interstate, an hour from the coast and an hour from the nearest good-sized city, Tallahassee.

Florida grows by about 900 people a day, and new homes have to be built. White and his partner, architect Julia Starr Sanford, wonder why it all has to be suburban sprawl.

Florida State University's Center for Advanced Power Systems is collaborating on the project, its engineers helping design the town. Then, they'll study what works and what doesn't.

Engineers think the most promising element is simply that the energy efficiencies will be done community-wide, rather than house-by-house.

For example, engineers envision having essentially one central air conditioner for the entire town and then distributing the cooled-air to houses. Some of the heating and cooling may be done with a geothermal system, where liquid is piped underground to be heated by the Earth in the winter and cooled by it in the summer and then used to heat and cool homes.

"That's a huge deal to look at it on the whole community level and the efficiency you can gain," said Rick Meeker, an engineer at the FSU center.