Posted on 25th November 2020

Power sharing at the stadium

Spearheaded by Sky Sports, Premier League Productions and BT Sports, the sports broadcasting community came up with a plan to address their environmental impact

In live sport – every moment counts – when we settle in to watch a game on TV, there’s upwards of 150 people on site, and even more back at base making sure that every goal, try, match point or hole in one is seen as it happens, from every conceivable angle.  For many, sport is an essential part of the fabric of life which we’ve realised only too starkly with the recent lockdown and the stakes for broadcasters are high. Missing any of the action can cost them big – potentially their contract. So changes which carry an element of risk, no matter how small, can’t be implemented easily.

But for an intrepid group in the sport broadcast community spearheaded by Sky Sports, Premier League Productions and BT Sports  – the need to reduce their overall environmental impact was an important focus and one which was worth pursuing in spite of the risks. They set up an OB Green Team to investigate what they could do.

Like all productions, the team identified that one of the biggest elements of their collective carbon footprint was the use of power. The power needed for each football game that’s broadcast is huge so using the house power at the stadium wasn’t an option. Instead, each production team would organise and bring their own generators.

It was a no brainer - we could all see that this one move would be cheaper, more efficient and bring down our collective carbon emissions

— Jo Finon, Contracts Manager at Sky Sports

Immediately, the team saw a simple solution that would be cheaper and more planet friendly – by agreeing to share power they could reduce the number of generators needed and therefore reduce their emissions too. They were also able to fuel the generators with Gas To Liquid (GTL) which – although not perfect – is a better option that diesel. In just 6 months, the team estimated that by sharing generators they were able to save around 50 tonnes in carbon emissions.

Hopefully now we’ve proven this collaboration works we can move forward with making changes elsewhere

— Sarita Neto, Production Executive at Premier League Productions