Philadelphia’s Stadium to be ‘Greenest in the World’
Posted: February 18, 2011 by Kaye, Category:Sustainability

Image Source: Philly.com
You might remember our post a couple of months back on the New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey, and how it did not seek LEED certification, despite an impressive list of green features.
Well, a hundred miles to the south, the Philadelphia Eagles are showing no such constraint with their home, Lincoln Financial Field. The team announced on November 18 that they will try to make it the “greenest stadium in the world.”
Constructed in 2003, “The Linc” was finished just before the green building boom really took off. The team’s owner, Jeffrey Lurie, launched the Eagles’ “Go Green” program in 2003, to “[incorporate] green initiatives, sustainable business practices and educational programs as our core operating principals.” Now, this new stadium initiative is set to be the crown jewel of the franchise’s efforts.
Among the features the team plans on installing:
- 2,500 solar panels on the roof
- 80 20-foot-tall wind turbines ringing the outside of the stadium
- A new power plant that runs on either biofuels or natural gas
When the $30 million retrofit is finished in September 2011, all these features will combine to produce at least 8.6 megawatts of electricity, much more than the stadium’s game day peak usage of 7 megawatts. The excess will be sold to a local utility company.
The end goal? To take the 70,000-seat stadium completely off the power grid through generating all of its own renewable power.
It looks as though, in America, green building is catching on quickly in the sports venue market. According to this Philadelphia Inquirer article, nine American stadiums have applied for LEED certification, and five more are considering it. The fact that these facilities are going with green retrofits to existing stadiums is a promising development for buildings that see the largest number of people gather at any one time in a given area, and thus, produce the most potential environmental waste. Now it seems they’re becoming almost as green as the grass on which their teams play.
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