Saturday, January 31, 2015

Super Bowl Teams are competing in the Solar Bowl too!

It appears that the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks are competing in another type of championship.  In what some are calling the “Solar Super Bowl,” the stadiums of the Patriots and Seahawks rank third and fourth respectively among all NFL stadiums in installed solar capacity.  Ranked by total cumulative capacity in kilowatts, only the stadiums of the Philadelphia Eagles and Washington Redskins beat Sunday’s Super Bowl rivals.

A growing number of sports facilities are going solar not only to be good citizens and protect the environment, but because solar is much cheaper than conventional energy!  Twenty seven major professional sports teams have solar venues.  To put that in perspective, last year in the U.S. nearly 30 million sports fans attended an event at a facility powered by the sun.

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (http://bit.ly/1JIUA2i), the solar systems installed at sports facilities across the United States saved nearly 20,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of planting half a million trees, or offsetting the equivalent CO2 emissions of 2.2 million gallons of gasoline.  

We commend the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks for recognizing that teams win when they go solar! May the best team win on Sunday, but we hope that the Solar Super Bowl continues to make champions for our planet earth, one solar system at a time.

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