As a follow-up to EMR’s post, “Job Creation in the Countryside,” which highlighted how German villages are adapting to contemporary economic challenges, I would point readers to a Wall Street Journal article, “In Bioenergy Villages, Power to the People.”

Dozens of villages across Germany have begun generating their own heat and electricity from biofuels such as liquid manure, wood and locally grown energy crops. “We don’t want to be getting 3,050 liters of oil off some ship from Saudi Arabia,” one villager told the Journal. This way, “the money stays here in the community.”

In Oberrosphe, villagers voted that residents would pay a flat rate of €6,000 (about $8,500) to link to the new heating grid. While the central government did subsidize the project by €1 million, the villagers came up with the rest. They estimate they will save €400 to €500 annually on heating costs, and even more when oil-heater maintenance costs are included. As a bonus, the village makes €1.1 million annually by selling electricity from the solar panels atop the wood-chip burner back to the local power grid.

Buried in the article is a key point: German villages can consider communal projects like this because the buildings are clustered close together. Thanks to the density and compactness of development within a clear edge, these urban enclaves (to borrow EMR terminology) can connect every residence to the heating system at relatively modest expense.

Given differentials in energy costs, it’s not clear that small bioenergy plants would make sense in the United States. Unfortunately, Virginians in the countryside will never get a chance to evaluate the potential. Because they live in scattered residences with nothing resembling a clear edge, the high cost of creating a collective bioenergy facility is a non-starter.

Likewise, scattered, low-density human settlement patterns in the Virginia countryside make it exceedingly expensive to install and upgrade high-bandwidth Internet connections. And don’t get me started about the cost of driving between scattered U.S. countryside locations as opposed to the cost of walking around in compact German villages.

I don’t credit the Germans with any special prescience when it comes to their preference for clustering in villages (although I’m guessing that EMR will tell me otherwise), but there can be little doubt that the village form of human habitation, however it arose historically, is superior to the scattered, frontier-farm form of human habitation for purposes of leap-frogging into a globally connected economy. When Virginians think about economic development in the countryside, they need to think about fundamentals like human settlement patterns. If they are unwilling to evolve, I cannot see how they can create viable communities.

(Photo credit: Wall Street Journal.)