Arsenal Football Club goes 100% renewable with solar deal

PV Magazine
Arsenal FC, fourth-place Premier League specialists in English soccer, have this week announced that their home ground – the Emirates Stadium – is now 100% supplied by renewable energy following a fruitful partnership with Octopus Energy.

The London-based soccer giants have become the first Premier League club to make the switch to fully green energy, sourcing all of its electricity from Octopus Energy, which has a U.K. network of 154 solar farms and additional anaerobic digestion sites that have enabled Arsenal to offset its annual CO2 emissions by 2.32 million kg – the equivalent of 580 fans’ annual carbon footprint.
The Emirates Stadium also has a water supply that is recycled, while all food waste makes its way back to Octopus Energy’s anaerobic digestion plants.
Ivan Gazidis, the chief executive of Arsenal, said: “It is important we all take steps in this area and I am pleased that we have switched to green energy as a result of our partnership with Octopus Energy.”
Solar and soccer have a long, if disjointed, history. The most high profile convergence of the two came in 2010 when Chinese solar giant Yingli was a leading sponsor of the World Cup held in South Africa.
Since then, the most obvious synergy has been the installation of solar panels at soccer stadiums, most notably the Stade de Suisse in Bern, Switzerland (Kyocera), the Hague Stadium in the Netherlands (Kyocera), the Weser Stadion in Bremen, and a handful of stadiums in Brazil (Yingli and Neoenergia).
Source: PV Magazine. Reproduced with permission.