Last night’s Super Bowl  between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Arizona Cardinals may go down as the best championship game in history.  Though this was a great game, it may also set the precedent on how to produce such large scale events while leaving a minimum impact on the planet.

Just think about how much of an energy draw a normal regular season football game creates, now you might want to go ahead and double that figure for the Super Bowl (Bruce Springsteen’s performance may have been the single biggest engery vampire of the event…Glory Days indeed).  Include the “NFL Experience”, which is the equivalent of a week long football conference full of sports personalities, on location radio shows and experiential marketing executions, and you are looking at the single biggest demand for energy in Tampa for the entire year.

The city of Tampa and the NFL saw this as great opportunity to not only set a low impact example for other large events, but also an opportunity to showcase the potential of renewable energy.  Sunday’s game and the “NFL Experience” leading up to the game were powered mostly through renewable energy via solar panels.

“Jack Groah of the NFL Environmental Program says “this year through a deal with Tampa Electric we were able to source renewable power to power both the stadium on game day and to power the nfl experience for the entire week… the Super Bowl is the biggest event in the country every year and if we can green up our event then why shouldn’t other people be able to do it well.”

Last night’s game may go down in history as one of the best sporting events to ever take place, but accolades are in order for  how this Super Bowl was powered.

*quotes taken from this article by Jamie Smith for NBC*