
This year the Golden State will be hosting the Golden Anniversary of what many consider the greatest spectacle in all of professional sports and this year the game will be powered in part by golden rays of sunshine.
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) is counting down to the kick off between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers, not just because we love the game, the multi-million dollar advertisements and the A-list halftime entertainment, but also because solar energy—our MVP—will be playing a starring role.
This year's big game will be played at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California. Home to the San Francisco 49ers, Levi's Stadium is the first professional football stadium in the National Football League (NFL) to open with LEED Gold certification. The Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design certification program recognizes best-in-class building strategies and practices. LEED certified buildings save money and resources and have positives impact on the health of occupants, while promoting renewable, clean energy.
Solar was a key strategy in the 49ers' sustainability playbook. The solar at the stadium through NRG's installations produces 375 kilowatts (kW) of peak power from more than 1,150 solar panels. In fact, the system can generate enough power in a year to meet electricity demand during every 49ers' home game. The first area of the NRG solar installation is the three NRG Bridges that lead fans into Levi's from the Red Parking Lot. The second is the NRG Solar Terrace which overlooks the football field and Silicon Valley from the top of the stadium.
“NRG was a true partner with us in building this stadium," Ethan Casson, 49ers chief revenue officer, said. “We could not have achieved LEED Gold certification without them."
San Jose-based SunPower built all of the solar photovoltaic (PV) panels for Levi's—544 on the stadium roof and another 642 on the NRG Energy Bridges, footbridges for fans that connect a main parking area to the stadium. In addition to producing power, the solar panels act as a shade canopy for the bridges and terrace.
“This year's big game is making environmental history as fans root for their favorite team, playing in the NFL's first LEED Gold certified stadium featuring SunPower high efficiency solar panels," Tom Werner, SunPower president and CEO, said. “At SunPower, we're proud to support our progressive commercial business partners that are making wise economic and environmental investments with solar."
In 2015, nearly a third of the NFL teams played or trained at stadiums with on-site solar assets. That's 8,000 solar PV panels, generating more than 10 million kilowatt-hours per year.
And there is more to come, with a new system under contract with the Baltimore Ravens and one in planning for the Atlanta Falcons. That's not to mention the nearly 1 million solar systems that are installed on homes and businesses across the country.
"It's a movement across the country—become more sustainable," Al Guido, 49ers chief operating officer, said. “And stadiums have to do their part. But we wanted to be functionally green, not just green for green's sake."
Hosting the game in the state-of-the-art Levi's Stadium is a major play for solar energy and part of a strong sustainability statement.
As NFL teams look for ways to keep their hometown fans cheering, investing in money-saving, 21st century technology like solar is a touchdown in everyone's playbook.
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The speed and scale of the response to COVID-19 by governments, businesses and individuals seems to provide hope that we can react to the climate change crisis in a similarly decisive manner - but history tells us that humans do not react to slow-moving and distant threats.
A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
Is it Time to Declare a Climate Emergency?
<p>At what stage, and at what rise in global temperatures, will these tipping points be reached? No one is entirely sure. It may take centuries, millennia or it could be imminent.</p><p>But as COVID-19 taught us, we need to prepare for the expected. We were aware of the risk of a pandemic. We also knew that we were not sufficiently prepared. But we didn't act in a meaningful manner. Thankfully, we have been able to fast-track the production of vaccines to combat COVID-19. But there is no vaccine for climate change once we have passed these tipping points.</p><p><a href="https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2021" target="_blank">We need to act now on our climate</a>. Act like these tipping points are imminent. And stop thinking of climate change as a slow-moving, long-term threat that enables us to kick the problem down the road and let future generations deal with it. We must take immediate action to reduce global warming and fulfill our commitments to the <a href="https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris Agreement</a>, and build resilience with these tipping points in mind.</p><p>We need to plan now to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, but we also need to plan for the impacts, such as the ability to feed everyone on the planet, develop plans to manage flood risk, as well as manage the social and geopolitical impacts of human migrations that will be a consequence of fight or flight decisions.</p><p>Breaching these tipping points would be cataclysmic and potentially far more devastating than COVID-19. Some may not enjoy hearing these messages, or consider them to be in the realm of science fiction. But if it injects a sense of urgency to make us respond to climate change like we have done to the pandemic, then we must talk more about what has happened before and will happen again.</p><p>Otherwise we will continue playing Jenga with our planet. And ultimately, there will only be one loser – us.</p>Trending
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