The 11th season of IPL is over and most of us are now bored by our screens. It is not new that we watch cricket, in more sense, a sport with such passion in India. It is a spectacle which has the power to unite the whole nation without any basis on caste, location or religion. And with hot summers, we always think about 2 things — one is the joy we get during holidays and the second is the power cut. This power cut is tough to avoid in most of the regions because the majority of our power production is from hydroelectric plants. The rivers get dried up in summer leading to power shortages. Well, electricity is crucial for sports too. Let’s see how a stadium consumes power.
For a cricket stadium…
Cricket takes a lot of energy — and not just from the players on the field.
You can tell just by looking at the huge banks of floodlights and flashing video screens that stadiums use electricity on an industrial scale. And these do have sound systems, comfortable club seating and luxury boxes which also lead to significant power consumption.
Let’s calculate the power consumption for stadiums on average. It all depends on a whole lot of things: the time of year, the local climate, the stadium’s age, size, number of seats, lighting, maintenance operations, offices, how much space needs to be climate-controlled, does the stadium have a dome, is the dome retractable and does it make its own energy? While stadiums might all appear to be just big buildings, each one is purposely built to be different — making it unique to its city and purpose.
The light tower system comprises six light towers which stand approximately 75 metres high (equivalent to a 24-story building) with the head frame a further 10 metres higher (85 metres overall). Power to the light towers is supplied off an 11kV electrical ring main into a transformer inside the base of each tower, which reduces the voltage down to 415 volts. The total power consumption at any given time is approximately 1800 Kilowatts.
If we take day/night matches into consideration and different type of matches like tests, ODIs and T20s, the running time of a stadium would be 400 hours. Let’s assume floodlights are used 60–70% of the time. The total Consumption for a year would be approximately 620,000kWh over a twelve-month term.
Most of the time, these lights are powered by generators instead of grid supply. In such cases, we need to look at the carbon footprint of a stadium. A report says that the stadiums contribute to 3% of the total carbon footprint of India.
There are some stadiums in India which have a huge number of matches happening compared to the rest like Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. As per KSCA Secretary Brijesh Patel, the Chinnaswamy stadium spends around Rs 1 to Rs. 1.2 crores on electricity bills for using about 18 lakh units of power annually. In order to counter this, they implemented solar to power the stadium. The new initiative will bring down this cost significantly and is expected to generate 6 lakh units of solar power annually, utilizing a portion of it and selling the surplus to BESCOM.
The solar project has 300Wp, 72 cells, multi-crystalline solar panels, with 20 kW Grid Tie type String Inverters, evacuated with bi-directional metering to BESCOM at HT level of 11 KV substation, under the new BESCOM Net Metering Solar Policy.
The project, costing Rs. 4.5 crore, was commissioned in February, 2018 and KSCA is expected to break even in just four years. Not only this, it will also be able to generate revenues of Rs. 70–80 lakhs every year with the power it generates.
This is an interesting aspect because the stadium has a new way of reducing and generating incomes. With the sport changing rapidly day by day, we as sports lovers must expect the stadiums to update themselves in a similar fashion.
