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A CLUB ON A MISSION
Nestled into the gentle green fields of the Somerset countryside is The Fully Charged New Lawn Stadium; the home of Forest Green Rovers. Look from the stands across the green fields and you can make out the wind turbine, which – along with the solar panels on the West Stand roof – helps to provide power for the club, which has been owned for the past decade by green energy pioneer Dale Vince.
Having founded the UK’s first green energy company, Ecotricity in 1995, Vince invested into his local team Forest Green Rovers in 2010 and has been the Chairman ever since. Over the last twelve years, the club has continually sought to introduce eco-friendly developments, from solarpowered robot mowers, recycled football kits, electric coaches and perhaps most famously, a completely vegan menu.
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Forest Green are all about encouraging their fans and football to make small choices that can make a difference. Most recently they’ve worked with the English Football League to introduce “EFL Green Clubs”, a new League-wide scheme to help improve the environmental practices and operations for all 72 clubs within the EFL.
A Unique Solution
It was important that any solution we created for The New Lawn Stadium would fit into the club’s sustainable ethos. The ambition was to create a solution that would run completely on green energy and avoid drawing power from the grid.
We were also determined that this would be a pioneer solution that could then be easily repeated in other stadiums to provide a way for other clubs to move towards greater sustainability in their matchday infrastructure.
The digital platform consists of a 100m run of digiBOARD running along the camera-facing touchline as well as a new digital scoreboard facing the main stand. We worked closely with a company called Powervault, who are specialists in home and business battery storage. The solution utilises the renewable energy sources available to the club – the local wind turbine and solar panels on the West Stand roof – to charge a bank of batteries located beneath the South Stand between each match. During the match, the digiBOARDs and scoreboard run completely from the stored power, which is then topped up again prior to the next usage.
