Stellar Greening at Denver’s Pepsi Center
Nice. Kroenke Sports VP of venue operations Dave Jolette has led a very nice retrofit of the circa 1999 Pepsi Center, home of the Nuggets (NBA), Avalanche NHL), Mammoth (Lacrosse) and Crush (Arena football). The areana also hosts 200 sporting events and concerts a year and will be the site of the 2008 Democractic Convention.
“Easily 80 percent of the things we’re doing saves money,” Jolette said, “and that 20 percent . . . well, it helps us sleep at night.”
Things they’re doing:
- reducing 13.6 million kilowatts used (year one) to 10.9 million kilowatts used (2007)
- recycling over 100 tons of cardboard
- offsetting 100 percent of its electricity demands through purchases of wind power
- using giant downdraft fans that re-circulate air trapped near the roof, reducing the amount of energy needed to heat the arena bowl
- providing preferred spaces to hybrid vehicle drivers
- Using 52 solar panels on the arena’s Blue Sky Grill restaurant to provide electricity to the venue and save 13,641 KWh annually, or 9.42 metric tons of CO2
“The best news is that this is just the start,” Jolette continued. “This is a sustained effort and the program doesn’t really have an endpoint. As long as there’s a need to protect the environment and a new way to do it, we’ll find a way to implement the change.”
Michele Weingarden — formerly Senator Boxer’s (D CA) environmental adviser and Campaign Manager for Save the Bay (San Francisco) — is director of Greenprint Denver, the city’s overarching environmental initiative,