Destiny, Florida picks up where Disney’s EPCOT left off: a sustainable, large-scale community, powered by bioenergy

In Florida, a sustainable community that will ultimately provide 50,000 homes south of Orlando, is providing a blueprint not only for Florida’s future land development, but the integration of biofuel production into a mixed-use community where sustainable agriculture, for food and fuel, is a cornerstone of the economic proposition.

In a town called Destiny, planners are reminding us that sustainability means not only the environment, but social and economic sustainability as well.

Heading the project is Randy Johnson, a prominent state legislator from Florida recently term-limited out of office, who had for years represented the Disney-developed “ideal community” of Celebration. Unlike the bedroom community approach of Celebration, Destiny brings business and agriculture together with residences into a new vision of sustainability. Somewhere Walt Disney, who envisioned EPCOT as an experimental community of just this sort instead of the permanent world’s fair it ultimately became, will be smiling.

“Leave the earth as you found it,” says Johnson, “is the outlook of the companies we want to have here in Destiny,” promising that the companies that locate in the Destiny ecosystem. Destiny farms are now planting and testing 20 acres of sweet sorghum in cooperation with Global Renewable Energy and the University of Florida.

Their goal: to discover what crops work best for energy production, and to move Destiny and Florida past the food-versus-fuel debate that has strangled the nation in its love-hate affair with corn ethanol. Johnson says that Destiny’s view is that corn is not viable as an energy crop in Florida, that the state is looking for crops that do not require the fertilizer intensive farming practices associated with corn cultivation.

More importantly, the state wants to find an alternative to the land-exhauting citrus cultivation that has left more and more acreage in Florida unable to sustain agriculture, making it ripe pickings for conversion to residential land.

“We want to get the science right on the front end,” Johnson said. “Sugar cane is water intensive, corn needs intense fertilizer. So we donated land and GRE and the University re studying it under a state grant.” Destiny will produce ethanol on a low-impact basis. For example, the farms will utilize a 1V solar-powered irrigation systems and a gravity flow system to improve water distribution. System cost, $20,000, or $1000 per acre.

The farms have dedicated “a couple of hundred acres” for jatropha test cultivation, next to a worked out citrus grove, and Johnson said that the farms are also testing algae cultivation. The energy crops will provide fuel, power and cash, as well as forming an urban buffer.

Also on the docket for Destiny: a 30MW solar array, a waste-to-power system extracting methane to drive turbines for power. The community establishes joint ventures with each of its partners, to keep a strong community involvement in each project. Also, a green building code, and mandating the use of renewables at every opportunity.

The Energy Farm will add additional feedstock crops and demo processing facilities in phases, as resources permit.  The current plan is to plant a small amount of jatropha and other oil based feedstock (i.e. camelina, sunflower) this year and add a small processing system (oil recovery, biodiesel) in 2010.

Based on the current size of the Energy Farm (40 acres), all fuel produced on-site will be used internally, with a long term goal of being fully self-sufficient. Current plans call for the production of biodiesel only.

Destiny is not organized as a city, interestingly, but as a Community development District, with the community unincorporated within Florida’s Osceola County, where Johnson says of the county council: “they get it”.

Destiny, as a fully developed community, is slated for 50,000 homes to ensure there are enough residents in high-density developments to support mass transit. “We’re looking for a paradign shift in development,” he said of the community’s size, scope, and its reach for something beyond unsustainability not only in ersidential development but old agricultural practices.

“Celebration was a great leap forward,” said Johnson, “when you measure what was built at the time, and as good as it was, but it can be so much better now that we have the ability on a cost basis to do much better. In Celebration, we set out to build the percet place to live, but now, we’re going back and doing it better. For example, we want a community where there is enough infrastructiure so that every family only needs one car, and people don’t have to fight over it.

“We spent many hours talking about EPCOT and Walt wanted it to be. About the dreama nd the building of that project. What Walt Disney really had in mind, well the technolgy and the systems just were not there in the 50s and 60s. It’s all do-able now because of great technological advances, and a convergence of them. Necessity is the mother of invention. With the economy faltering , American are starting to get it.”

A sustainable community that produces its own energy crops, generates its own power, and reduces carbon at every opportunity in the agricultural process. Builds on a scale where mass transit is possible and families do not use a second car. And a commitment to integrating university researchers, corporate entrpreneurship, and community involvement in the structuring of energy enterprises to serve the community with food and fuel.

Walt Disney would marvel at it. It’s the “most sustainable place on earth” to borrow from a Disney phrase. The vision was styled Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) is no longer experimental, or tomorrow. It’s a prototype, for sure, but not hard to replicate. And, more importantly, it is somethign EPCOT hoped to be and never was: a living community.

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