It’s Super Bowl weekend in Las Vegas. The city’s bright lights and huge marquees shine as thousands of fans arrive by air and car. Taylor Swift will almost certainly fly aboard her jet, one of approx 1,000 private planes expected at local airports. On Sunday, unprecedented numbers of vehicles will enter parking lots. Once inside Allegiant Stadium, fans will be greeted by lights and more than 2,200 screens. They will order cold beers and hot coffee, burgers and nachos and other grilled and fried and fried snacks. The entire venue, all 1.8 million square feet of it, is climate controlled for the comfort of 65,000 fans and the players they will cheer on.
In short, the day’s festivities are going to suck very of energy, about 28 megawatt-hours through the treasure from NZero, the company the Las Vegas Raiders hired to monitor emissions from its stadium.
That’s a lot of power no matter how you look at it, and the NFL, nothing if not completely conscious of its image, recently rebranded itself as a champion of sustainability. Over the past few years, it has started waste reduction programs, and 23 percent of stadiums are powered by solar energy one way or another. But even by the measure, the league calls this year’s Super Bowl, featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, the greenest yet, because it will be powered entirely by renewable energy. The company’s sustainability arm, NFL Green, works with each year’s host city to offset other emissions through community gardens and tree plantings.
“We work to leave a positive ‘green legacy’ in the communities that host our events and tailor our greening projects to the needs of each community,” NFL Green Director Susan Groh told Forbes.
The Las Vegas Raiders, who moved into Allegiant Stadium in 2020, have a 25-year contract to buy electricity from NV Energy, which maintains a 621,000-panel solar farm in the desert northwest of Las Vegas. The amount of energy flowing from the panels, along with some wind, geothermal and hydro sources, to the game is enough to allow 46,000 homes nationwide to watch the four-hour game, according to the utility company.
The NFL doesn’t have much say in the energy mix of a given arena, and Allegiant Stadium, like almost everything else in Las Vegas, will draw from a grid that also relies on natural gas. But the amount of energy the Super Bowl is expected to use this weekend is roughly equal to the capacity of the solar farm it draws from, says Jonathan Casper, who studies the intersection of sports and sustainability at North Carolina State University, among other things. . The stadium pre-arranged for the massive power draw with NV Energy, and has batteries on site to store the power after sunset.
“The teams see energy as a big expense,” Casper said. While there may be some greening going on with the “100 percent renewable” claim, he says it remains a positive sign that sports leagues and their teams are increasingly serious about decarbonization.
“It’s becoming a norm in stadium construction that sustainability is important,” he said.
Most new stadiums, like the Las Vegas Raiders’ $1.9 billion home, are LEED-certified, which means they do things like source and dispose of food more sustainably, accept recycling, and energy-saving tricks like LED- using light and water efficient plumbing. Such things were rare even a few years ago. The Raiders hired NZero to track it down and independently verify it full range of emissionsof those that are driven by its air conditioning and award-winning (really) lighting to the exhaust fumes involved in getting everyone there on match days.
“As the largest sports stage in the US, it shows we can bring renewable energy to sporting events,” said Adam Kramer, the CEO of NZero. He added that agreements with utilities are an essential part of this, as it would take a staggering sixty hectares of on-site solar panels to achieve the same amount of energy capacity.
What’s happening in the NFL reflects the global momentum pushing sports sustainability forward. A group called the Green Sports Alliance joined the UN Sport for Climate Action Framework in 2019, and major teams such as the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees have signed its pledge to reduce emissions. In Europe, teams start tracking their carbon footprintswith some hope a more standardized accountability system may be on the way. Fans are encouraged to join the effort by cycling to the game or using public transport. Many of Europe’s football, or soccer, clubs have seen their emissions drop as a result, according to one reportalthough only direct emissions are easily measurable.
Transport-related emissions are by far the biggest contributor to the sports industry’s carbon footprint. The biggest events, Casper said, would have trouble managing that because all the fans there are part of what makes events like the Super Bowl or Olympics fun.
Turning a ship the size of the NFL or any other sports league can take a long time, but a change in course of a few degrees can go a long way in raising public awareness of the need for and benefits of decarbonization. increased, Casper said. Even if the claim that this year’s Super Bowl is powered entirely by renewable energy may lean a little too heavily on PR spin, it does help promote the idea of clean energy in general to 60,000 fans in the stands and millions more people watching on TV to sell.
“There are only a few chances where that many people can come together and see this,” Casper said.
