Renewable energy progress in sport

TL;DR

• Sport as a sector can do more to improve its carbon footprint and could also be extremely influential thanks to its international fanbase. 58% of British adults follow at least one sport and football alone has approximately 1.5 billion fans worldwide.

• Football is one of the sports that has taken steps to embrace renewable energy in its stadiums. Arsenal FC is has adopted 100% renewable energy through its supplier while, in the Netherlands, the Johan Cruyff Arena has powered an entire match with a battery pack fuelled by renewable energy, including energy generated from its own solar panels.

• Formula One has also taken steps to improve its carbon footprint, introducing onsite solar, bioenergy, and energy storage technologies to reduce operational emissions in the Paddock, Pit Lane, and broadcast areas by 90% year-on-year.

• Formula E has demonstrated that there is an audience for more sustainable sports, and it has the power to increase public awareness of issues such as the concerning levels of e-tech waste being produced.

• However, these cases are exceptions rather than the rule and little is being done to tackle some of the biggest contributors to sports’ carbon footprint such as logistics and transport. The industry can do and say more to make an impact and help the world reach its net-zero goals by 2050.

The detail

Sport and sustainability – it’s probably not a pairing that springs to mind all that often. But the more you think about it, the more this couple starts to make sense.

We can all acknowledge that sustainability has – or will have – a tremendous impact on all our lives. It is the umbrella under which the battle against climate change will be fought. If the world is to reach net-zero by 2050 (or at any point in the future), every industry will need to seriously consider its sustainable credentials.

However, it’s rare that we look at industries beyond the big nine: power; oil and gas; automotive; aviation and shipping; steel; cement; mining; agriculture and food; and forestry and land use. These are the sectors that produce most of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, but they aren’t the only industries worthy of attention. Entertainment, sports and technology could all play an influential role in tackling the climate crisis.

Sport is surprisingly impactful on our everyday lives. According to a recent YouGov survey, 58% of British adults follow at least one sport, with the sector having contributed £18.1 billion to the UK economy in 2022.

Sports teams and individuals also have an outsized influence; footballers Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi are the two most followed people on Instagram, boasting 640 million and 540 million followers respectively. Where these players lead, a large percentage of the world will follow.

Happily, an increasing number of sports are starting to introduce sustainable initiatives, whether that’s using renewable energy to power their venues, reducing waste, or rewarding fans travelling to events by public transport.

Going for a (sustainable) goal

Football is by far the most popular sport, in the UK and beyond. There are five billion football fans around the world with the largest fanbases found in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. In 2022, the World Cup final had a global audience of approximately 1.5 billion people. In the UK, 41% of adults say they follow football with tennis coming in a distant second place at 18%.

But how exactly is the sport driving positive change through action, embracing renewables in the manner that is needed?

Gunners’ fans should be proud to learn that Arsenal was the first UK football team to install large battery energy storage solutions at its Emirates stadium. The club now buys 100% renewable energy from its supplier, Octopus Energy, and its battery also means it saves money as well as generating an extra income by feeding its spare capacity to the grid. At the other end of the footballing pyramid, Shoreham FC, an amateur football club, also sources 100% renewable energy through Octopus Energy, proving it’s possible to adopt renewables at every level.

Heading over the Channel, the Johan Cruyff Arena in the Netherlands is leading the way when it comes to sustainability. Home to Ajax football club, it powered an entire match using an 8.6 megawatt-hour battery pack, entirely fuelled by renewable energy. During the match, clean energy powered the stadium lights as well as its lifts, beer taps, and the lighting in the players’ tunnels. The stadium uses LED lighting to further reduce its energy demand and 4,200 solar panels across its roof help to charge the battery pack.

Talking tournaments

It's not just domestic clubs that have a responsibility to curb their carbon footprint, international tournaments can also clean up their act. Ahead of Euro 2024, UEFA committed 5% of the total tournament budget – £27 million – to make the tournament more sustainable. Initiatives included using existing stadiums and harnessing renewable energy in those stadiums, clustering fixtures to limit team and fan travel, providing public transport passes for ticket holders, and refusing commercial partnerships with gas, oil and utility companies.

While not a perfect tournament in terms of its climate impact, Euro 2024 was a marked improvement on the World Cup in Qatar. It is estimated that the event emitted 490,000 tonnes of carbon compared to the 3.63 billion tonnes produced in Qatar. It’s also worth noting that 80% of the carbon emissions at Euro 2024 were generated by travel. Several teams, including England, were criticised for choosing bases several hundred miles away from their group game locations.

Driving sustainability forward

Looking beyond football, one of the sports it would be easy to assume is the least sustainable is Formula One.

High octane cars combined with international travel (usually by private jet for the drivers at least) is a recipe for extreme carbon emissions. However, it may be surprising to learn that Formula One is aiming to achieve net-zero operational carbon emissions by 2030. It has started making moves towards meeting this goal with trial events in Austria, Hungary and Monza taking place during the 2024 season.

Organisers have introduced onsite solar, bioenergy and energy storage technologies, which are known collectively as the centralised power generation compound. First introduced at the Austrian Grand Prix in the summer of 2023, the compound supplies all garages and motorhomes across the race weekend as well as powering the pit walls, timing rooms, event technical centres, and international TV compounds. The initial results look extremely positive; introducing the compound led to a 90% year-on-year decrease of operational emissions in the Paddock, Pit Lane and broadcast areas.

Since Formula One turned its focus to cutting its carbon emissions, a 13% reduction in its absolute carbon emissions has been recorded. In large part, this shift has been driven by logistics changes. Logistics previously accounted for 49% of Formula One’s total carbon footprint, but now the sport has shifted to using biodiesel trucks across Europe. However, it’s worth noting that business travel, event operations, factories and facilities are still responsible for substantial carbon emissions. In fact, less than 1% of the sport’s carbon footprint is due to race car fuel.

Mercedes F1 team has attempted to reduce its own travel emissions by becoming the first global sports team to invest in sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) as well as using biofuels across its fleet of freight trucks in Europe. The entire race season generates approximately 256,000 tonnes of carbon and a quarter of those emissions come from aviation. While the globetrotting nature of the sport means there’s no quick fix for emissions generated by travel, Mercedes has tried to mitigate its impact with SAF as well as establishing localised freight storage hubs and a sustainable travel policy for its employees.

Racing to victory and raising awareness

It's also promising to see the growth of Formula E, the electric equivalent to Formula One. More than 225 million people tuned in to the sport latest season, meaning it has serious potential to accelerate the pace of climate action. One team, Envision Racing, is taking things a step further by working to increase public awareness around e-waste: the rubbish generated from unwanted technology. Critically, Envision Racing created the first full-sized driveable Formula E race car made entirely from discarded technology. The achievement was so noteworthy that it earned a spot on the BBC The One Show, which averages three million viewers in the UK.

Other sports are also getting in on the act:

• Cricket: Lord’s cricket ground now sources all its energy from an offshore local wind farm, which has enabled it to reduce its carbon footprint by 80%.

• Basketball: Further afield, the home of the Atlanta Hawks NBA team, the State Farm Arena, became the world’s first officially recognised zero-waste venue in 2021. It managed to divert, compost, reuse or recycled more than 90% of its waste that year. To put the size of its achievement in perspective, that figure was just over 10% in 2019.

• Baseball: In the world of baseball, Petco Park – home to the San Diego Padres – installed a solar panel system on its upper deck, which not only improved its eco-credentials but also led to savings of more than $4 million.

There’s still a hill to climb

Sport has the potential to set a new standard in sustainability. Not only does it benefit from having stadiums and grounds that seem almost ready made for rooftop solar, but it also has the power to change hearts and minds.

Fans have been known to name their children after their favourite sportspeople (when David Beckham joined LA Galaxy in 2007, the number of American children called Beckham increased by 77.7% between 2006 and 2008), so it’s not too much of a stretch to think that teams adopting renewable energy might inspire their fans to do the same.

Stadiums like the Johan Cruyff Arena prove that it is possible to host a match powered entirely by renewable energy and, in the case of the San Diego Padres, potentially even save money in the process.

Even so, the energy used during each match or game is only one piece of the puzzle.

Teams and governing bodies are only just starting to scratch the service in tackling the logistics and travel that are a key part of the sports industry; providing free public transport travel for fans in Euro 2024, for example, will quickly be cancelled out by the England team travelling across Germany by plane for every group match.

Change is happening, but it’s not happening quickly or loudly enough. It shouldn’t be the case that we can pick out certain football clubs or Formula One teams that are proactively improving their sustainability – they all should be making these changes. Big oil is still a leading sponsor in the motor industry, Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup led to enormous carbon emissions, and a typical NFL game in the US still produces approximately 35 tonnes of waste.

Sport should say and do more – and it needs to be acting faster, especially if net-zero targets are to be met by 2050. It’s time for the industry to step up its performance and claim its spot as a champion of sustainability.

— Lew 👋

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