-
Mercedes-Benz Superdome, New Orleans
Multiple-exposure photograph by Gerard Lodriguss, Getty Images
When the Ravens and 49ers face off Sunday in Super Bowl XLVII, it will be in a city—and stadium—that have spent more than six years battling back from natural and ecological disaster.
So it's no surprise that New Orleans aims to set a new mark for environmental sustainability in its ninth turn at hosting the NFL's marquee event, reflecting a broader green movement that is changing the look of stadiums and attitudes throughout the sports world.
"It's a wonderful platform to bring people together to think about how our actions as individuals matter, and what we can do about climate change," says Patty Riddlebarger, director of corporate social responsibility for the Gulf Coast energy company Entergy. She has chaired the New Orleans Host Committee's environmental effort over the past two years.
Riddlebarger notes that much of the world holds a lingering image of the Superdome far different from the renovated stadium that will showcase the game. After a $336 million restoration, the "refuge of last resort" for 30,000 people during Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 is now buttressed with protective and energy-saving features. The stadium's outer wall is a specially designed double barrier system with improved insulation and rainwater control. The Mercedes-Benz Superdome, as it is now known, is ringed with 26,000 LED lights, covering two million square feet and supported by five miles of copper wiring, but which draw only ten kilowatts of electricity—as much as a small home. The stadium stands as an example for "not just rebuilding what was there before, but making it more environmentally sound," Riddlebarger says.
Entergy will donate carbon credits—investments in projects that capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—to offset the estimated 3.8 million pounds of emissions expected to be generated due to energy use at the Super Bowl venues. New Orleans' Second Harvest Food Bank will recover unused food items from all Super Bowl events to donate to those in need. And two nonprofits, the Green Project and REPurposingNola, will reclaim Super Bowl banners, displays, and other promotional items to be recycled into souvenir items such as tote bags, wallets, and shower curtains.
The Host Committee organized a Super Bowl Saturday day of service focused on continuing restoration. New Orleans is one of the most deforested cities in the United States, having lost 100,000 trees to Katrina's wind and standing saltwater. The urban forestry initiative Hike for KaTreena will mark the planting of its 20,000th tree on Saturday—7,000 of them planted or given away in a drive organized around the game (a Super Bowl tree-planting record). And since Saturday is World Wetlands Day, local students will join a coastal restoration project in Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge coordinated with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, whose administrator, Lisa Jackson, is a New Orleans native.
The effort around this year's Super Bowl is part of a larger movement around green games and green stadiums, featuring solar panels, wind turbines, efficient lighting, recycling, and innovative water-management systems. Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which has been working for years with U.S. professional sports teams, believes that the influence of sports gives such partnerships "the potential to become one of the most important collaborations in the history of the environmental movement."
"Sports is the ultimate cultural unifier and if you want to change the world, you don't emphasize how different you are from everyone else," he wrote recently in his NRDC blog about the report, "Game Changer: How the Sports Industry is Saving the Environment." "We need to bond through our common connections."
—Marianne Lavelle, Amy Sinatra Ayres, and Jeff Barker
This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.
Published February 1, 2013
-
Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia
Photograph by Brian Garfinkel, AP
No matter the fortunes of the Eagles on the field, Philadelphia has led the NFL for a decade in green initiatives, capped by the 14 distinctive micro wind turbines that now crown Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
The turbines, seven above each end zone, were installed in November by New York City-based Urban Green Energy. (Related: "Helix Collapse Fails to Crush Hopes for Vertical Wind Turbines") It's part of what NRDC calls "the most extensive onsite renewable system of any U.S. sports stadium," including 2,500 solar panels and a generator that can run on natural gas or biodiesel. Lincoln Financial Field is the first professional stadium in the United States capable of generating all its electricity on site. But the Eagles also purchase 14 million kilowatt-hours of renewable energy credits annually, meaning that 100 percent of the team's operations are powered by clean energy. The Eagles also have adopted aggressive energy-conservation and waste-reduction measures. The team switched to recycled paper products nearly a decade ago, and about 75 percent of stadium waste is now recycled.
The NRDC report notes that there are quarterly meetings among NFL teams to exchange ideas on greening their stadiums and operations.
This year's Super Bowl teams also are in on the greening game. The Baltimore Ravens' M&T Bank Stadium is seeking to become the first existing NFL stadium to receive certification in the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED program for energy-efficient and environmentally sensitive operations and management. The San Francisco 49ers will seek LEED certification for their new stadium now being built in Santa Clara, California. The stadium will feature solar-array-covered bridges, a solar canopy above the green roof on the suite tower portion of the stadium, and solar panels over the 49ers training center. The effort is being led by NRG Energy, which has spearheaded other sports stadium renewable-energy efforts unveiled this year.
Published February 1, 2013
-
MetLife Stadium, East Rutherford, New Jersey
Photograph courtesy Jim Sulley, NRG
The NFL's biggest stadium debuted a high-profile push toward renewable energy at the start of this season with a ring featuring 1,350 solar panels that turn blue or green depending on which home team is on the field: the New York Giants or the New York Jets.
"I think it's really going to emerge as sort of an iconic physical element" for the stadium, said David Crane, chief executive officer of NRG Energy, which designed the ring.
Together, the panels generate 25 times the power needed to run the LED lights that come to life at night. The excess power is used to service the rest of the stadium. In all, the solar power system generates 350,000 kilowatt-hours—enough to meet approximately 10 percent of the stadium's power needs on game days.
Published February 1, 2013
-
Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Massachusetts
Photograph courtesy Michelle McLoughlin, NRG
The home of the New England Patriots, which has been topped with a solar array since 2009, ramped up energy from the sun this year with a solar canopy and a set of rooftop panels at adjacent Patriot Place, an outdoor shopping and dining center. The combination of 3,000 solar panels is expected to generate 1.1 million kilowatt-hours a year—about 60 percent of Patriot Place's electricity use.
NRG spearheaded the project as part of its "icon strategy," where the company looked for well-known structures in the United States that were "more horizontal construction—and it didn't take us long to get to the NFL stadiums," said Crane in an interview last year. "They're big, they're cool, they're usually surrounded by big parking lots," which lend themselves to solar installations.
Crane declined to reveal specific price tags for the projects, but said they tend to run in the "several million" dollar range.
And how long does it take for a stadium to recover those costs with energy savings?
"In terms of the return on the investment, we're used to getting a return over a fairly long term in our industry," Crane said. "Any investment we do, we calculate over a 20-year term."
But he said solar isn't as expensive as it once was. "The price of solar panels has dropped precipitously," Crane said. Most of the costs at the stadiums are associated with their highly stylized looks and the installation work that involves. "You can't do computer-driven LED lighting and achieve the same price point as you can for lining up solar panels in a desert." (Which is what many of the company's lower-profile installations involve.)
"On one level, we know that people who are going to football games are going to football games to look at Tom Brady, they're not going to look at our panels on the roof," Crane laughed. Still, the hope is that "fans will look at them and say, 'my team is doing the right thing.' It's really about raising awareness with the fan base."
Published February 1, 2013
-
FedEx Field, Landover, Maryland
Photograph by Max Taylor
The Washington Redskins unveiled an installation of 8,000 solar panels at FedEx Field at the start of the 2011 season.
Team sponsor NRG Energy designed the panels to have an impact that select fans experience the moment they arrive at the lot at FedEx Field in Landover, Maryland. The panels are installed above 841 premium parking spaces across the street from the stadium, providing a new covered venue to protect fans from the elements.
The project's most prominent feature is the parking structure, which looks like a series of car ports and contains about 7,500 of the panels (manufactured by SunPower). Translucent solar panels—produced by Schott—collect energy above a stadium ramp. A third variety of solar panel, a thin-film product made by Konarka Technologies, is contained in a 30-foot (9-meter) sculpture of a silhouetted football player throwing a pass.
There are two electric-vehicle charging stations in the lot where the solar panels are located, and eight more charging stations in an adjacent lot. NRG said the solar installation, the largest in the NFL (at one of the league's largest stadiums), will produce up to two megawatts of electrical capacity-enough to provide up to 20 percent of the stadium's power on game days and to meet the building's needs on non-game days. (You can see a time-lapse video of the installation here.) "One of the really innovative things that NRG has done is show how solar power can be integrated into an existing structure," said NRG spokesman Stephen Morisseau.
NRG owns the installation and will sell electricity back to the team, Crane said. He declined to disclose the project's price tag, saying "that's competitively very sensitive information." Crane said the cost of such installations has dropped but that "it takes time to recover your money."
Published February 1, 2013
-
CenturyLink Field, Seattle
Photograph courtesy Rod Mar, Seattle Seahawks
Forget that Seattle is known for rain and clouds. "I think the cloudiness factor is more mythological than real," Seahawks team president Peter McLoughlin said in an interview in 2011, when the team unveiled the 3,750-panel array that now adorns the roof of CenturyLink Field.
The project at CenturyLink Field (seen here)—home to Major League Soccer's Seattle Sounders as well as the Seahawks—was seen as a breakthrough when it was being constructed because it doesn't need direct sunlight. The technology, thin-film photovoltaic material around a unique 360-degree cylindrical surface was the signature achievement of Solyndra, the bankrupt California energy company. (Related: "Solar Energy 'Darwinism' Weeding Out Weaker Companies")
Despite Solyndra's failure amid bruising competition in the solar industry, the technology is alive and working above CenturyLink Field, generating an estimated 830,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, enough to power 95 Seattle-area homes for a year.
Published February 1, 2013
-
Next: More Green Stadiums Worldwide
Illustration courtesy HH-Vision and Albert Speer & Partner
Published February 1, 2013
Latest Energy News
-
Mexico’s Bid for Energy Reform Stirs Passion on Oil Patrimony
Mexico's president seeks to stem falling oil production by luring foreign money and technology. But the privatization drive faces nationalistic opposition.
-
Quiz: What You Don’t Know About Climate Change Science
Every few years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a new summary of the scientific consensus on climate change. How much do you know about the forces altering the Earth's temperature, according to the IPCC's September 2013 report?
-
Climate Change Action Could Save 500,000 Lives Annually, Study Says
Global action to curb climate change could save 500,000 lives annually, far outweighing the projected cost of reducing fossil fuel emissions, a new study says.
Advertisement
The Big Energy Question
-
Arctic Development: What Should We Know?
As shipping and energy activity increase in the region, what do we urgently need to learn more about? Vote and comment on the list.
-
What Breakthroughs Do Biofuels Need?
Rate the ideas and comment with your own.
-
What Energy Solution to Develop Next?
Given a few examples of proposed next energy directions, how do you rate these ideas, and why?
The Great Energy Challenge
The Great Energy Challenge is an important National Geographic initiative designed to help all of us better understand the breadth and depth of our current energy situation.
