Did Babcock Ranch run entirely on solar during Hurricane Ian?

Not in the way the headlines imply. The town stayed tied to FPL's system and benefited heavily from buried lines, high ground, and its inland location. The solar and battery are part of the story, not the whole of it.

How big is the solar array?

The developer cites more than 700,000 panels at the FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center. Exact output figures shift with expansions, so treat any single megawatt number as approximate and check FPL's project page.

Is my own neighborhood likely to get a system like this?

Probably not as a whole, at least not soon. Undergrounding and microgrids are far cheaper to build into a new community than to retrofit, though FPL's hardening programs may bring pieces of it to existing areas over time.

Who pays for the solar and battery?

FPL owns them as regulated assets, which generally means costs are recovered from ratepayers through mechanisms the Florida Public Service Commission approves. The town did not build its own utility.

The town that kept its lights on: Babcock Ranch and the solar microgrid test

I. How the pieces fit: panels, battery, and buried wire

The visible part is the FPL Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center, a field of more than 700,000 panels by the developer's count, sitting across from the town itself. Solar alone does not keep lights on after dark or during a storm, so Florida Power and Light (FPL) also installed a battery on the order of 10 megawatts at last public report, which can hold a charge and release it when the panels are not producing.

The less visible part may matter more. The town's power lines are buried rather than strung overhead, so wind and flying debris have far less to knock down, and the community sits on relatively high ground, roughly 30 feet above sea level, which was a deliberate siting choice. The design also allows for islanding (the ability to disconnect from the larger grid and keep running on local power), though how fully that was used during Ian is harder to pin down than the shorthand suggests.

II. What we can actually document from Ian

Hurricane Ian came ashore near Cayo Costa as a major hurricane in late September 2022, per the National Hurricane Center, and drove a destructive surge into the Fort Myers coast. Babcock Ranch sits inland in Charlotte County, away from the worst of that surge, and both FPL and the developer have said the community kept power and water through the event.

What is harder to separate is how much of that came from the solar and battery system and how much from plain geography. Buried lines, high ground, and distance from the coast would help any town, with or without panels on the hill. The honest reading is that the microgrid design and the siting worked together, and the public record does not let us cleanly credit one over the other.

III. Who owns what: FPL, the developer, and the regulator

Two names do most of the work here. FPL owns and runs the solar center and the battery as part of its regulated system, while Kitson and Partners, the developer behind Syd Kitson's project, built the town and made undergrounding and siting central to its pitch. The panels are not a private town utility; they feed FPL's grid like other large solar sites in the state.

That makes the Florida Public Service Commission (FPSC), the five-member state board that sets FPL's rates, the quiet third party. Large solar like this is typically recovered from ratepayers through FPL's approved solar cost mechanisms, so the economics of a Babcock-style build are decided in Tallahassee dockets, not at the town line.

IV. Could your town copy it? The catch is the blank slate

The appeal is obvious to anyone who lost a freezer full of food to Ian. The catch is that Babcock Ranch was built from nothing on chosen ground: burying lines and picking a high, inland site is far cheaper when you do it before the first house goes up than when you retrofit a town that already exists.

For established neighborhoods the pieces still apply, just at higher cost and slower pace: undergrounding programs, local battery and microgrid projects, and FPL's storm-hardening work filed with the FPSC. Whether your block sees any of it depends on those plans and their funding, and that is a genuine it depends, not a dodge.

V. Worth watching this month

1. FPL's storm protection plan and its cost recovery, reviewed periodically at the Florida Public Service Commission, is the main public venue for how much undergrounding and hardening ratepayers fund next.

2. Any FPL or FPSC filing that reports on Babcock Ranch solar or storage performance is worth reading directly rather than through a viral clip, and this one actually matters for the resilience claim.

3. The National Hurricane Center's post-season reports remain the checkable record for where storms struck, against which any resilience claim should be measured; this is routine but useful.

4. New FPL solar and battery sites listed on the company's project pages signal whether the Babcock model is spreading or staying a showcase.

5. Watch the start of the next Atlantic hurricane season in June for whether any new Florida community markets a similar solar-plus-storage claim, and hold it to the same documentation standard.

U.S. Energy Information Administration, Florida State Energy Profile (government), Federal data on Florida's electricity mix and growing solar share, a neutral check on any single utility's figures., www.eia.gov/state/?sid=FL
NOAA National Hurricane Center, Hurricane Ian reports (government), The official tropical cyclone record for where Ian made landfall and how strong it was, the baseline for any storm-resilience claim., www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr
Florida Public Service Commission (state agency), Where FPL's rates, solar cost recovery, and storm protection plans are filed and decided; search dockets by company., www.floridapsc.com
Florida Power and Light, Babcock Ranch Solar Energy Center, The utility's own page on the array and battery serving the community; the primary source for panel counts and project scope., www.fpl.com/clean-energy/solar/babcock-ranch.html
Babcock Ranch (Kitson and Partners), The developer's description of the town's design, including undergrounding and siting choices that shaped its storm performance., babcockranch.com
U.S. Department of Energy, NREL microgrid resources (government), Plain federal explainers on what a microgrid and islanding actually are, useful for separating marketing from mechanics., www.nrel.gov/grid/microgrids.html