Here's an idea for a power plant: the solar-powered sports coliseum. What if you skinned an entire stadium with solar such that it could satisfy its own ginormous appetite for power when filled with spectators, but when idle (which is usually often) its solar panels could still be at work, making and feeding electricity to the grid? Sports facility as power plant. A colossal idea not likely to be done anytime soon; a rich fantasy beyond the pale.
Except that it has been done, in Taiwan. Recently completed to host the 2009 Goodwill Games, the stadium will be able to supply all the juice for its 3,300 lights and two jumbotrons, or local residents when the lights and screens are off.
Solar seldom makes the payback cut, but maybe it just sort of gets tucked into the mega-buck coliseum construction budget. Consider: the new Cowboys football stadium in Texas (which has no solar) seats 80,000 and cost 1,000,000,000. Taiwan's stadium cost 182,000,000 and seats 50,000. Can't say how the math works for these two stadiums on opposite ends of the planet, but in the 818,000,000 difference between the two, couldn't you toss solar into the 1 billion dollar deal like a golden crumb? If solar for the Cowboys Stadium had cost 90 million (half the total price tag for the Taiwan stadium), Cowboys becomes a 1.09 billion project; a meager 0.09 crumb gets tacked onto the end of the thing.
Maybe solar does find its way into the deal, especially if you consider the inverting perversion of normal costing that happens with big, shiny new stadiums: the more expensive a Cowboys stadium is, the more attractive it becomes, the more the monied flock to it as the place to see and be seen (big sports deals like this seem to defy the laws of gravity that bedraggle developers financing traditional projects). In this trembling economy, the Cowboys don't seem to have trouble finding people willing to pony up the 100,000 to 500,000 a year to lease their suites. Solar could certainly help make the project more fantastic and over-the-top and expensive, while proffering eco-chic, cutting-edge-with-a-social-purpose flair to the See-and-be-Seens.
The solar powered coliseum could be more than a one-off oddity, it could become the de rigueur way to add sports facilities to the community, where the facility is asked to do more than simply entertain us, it is asked to help us tackle some of our bigger challenges.
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WATCH VIDEO: Solar Energy Simplified. Solar power can be complicated, but Solar Decathlon director Richard King gives Discovery News the lowdown on the three ways anyone can tap the sun's energy.
Photos: Taiwan National Stadium courtesy Inhabitat; Cowboys Stadium from Wikimedia
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