Dutch stadium could hold blueprint for Murrayfield's green ambitions

Times

12 hours ago

Later this year, as part of the Murrayfield centenary celebrations, the Scottish Rugby Union is expected to put forward wide-ranging plans aimed at transforming both the stadium and its surrounding footprint.
The union will hope to harness a mix of private and public funding in an effort to not only bring Scotland's largest venue into the 21st century but also position it as a beacon of customer experience that can drive revenue on far more than a handful of international match days each year.
For a shining example of the power of collaborative working, and how placing sustainability at the heart of its plans could aid the bottom line as well as the planet, the SRU might look to Amsterdam's Johan Cruyff ArenA, a venue constructed in the mid-1990s around the same time that Murrayfield last underwent serious redevelopment.
Since then, the public-facing areas at the home of Scottish rugby have received minimal care and investment, whereas the ArenA has become a world-renowned cradle of innovation, most notably with regards to how the football matches, concerts and business events staged there are powered.
The stadium, owned by a combination of the local authority, Ajax FC and other private companies, has invested in a state-of-the-art energy storage system that has dramatically reduced reliance on diesel generators for back-up power on event days.
Some 4,200 solar panels are arranged on the roof of the stadium, and the green energy captured by these units, in addition to a nearby wind turbine and solar park, is transferred to two 'mega-batteries' located deep in the bowels of a facility that has a sliding capacity of between 56,000 (for football) and 71,000 (for concerts).
The first of these mega-batteries was installed in 2018 using 148 new and second-life batteries from Nissan Leaf electric vehicles and remains the largest project of its kind in a European commercial building. Two thirds of the project was funded via a loan from the Amsterdam Climate and Energy Fund, with the remainder coming from private sources.
The second battery arrived last year, giving the ArenA a total storage capacity of 8.6 megawatt hours. This is enough to charge 1.7 million phones or provide 20,000 households with electricity for an hour.
Last August Ajax's Eredivisie season opener against Heerenveen made history as the first major football match to run entirely on green energy, from the floodlights and concourse lighting to beer taps and refreshment stalls. The ambition is for the ArenA to be putting on net-positive events by 2030. Already, excess energy in the batteries is sold back to the grid.
Eaton, the power management giant, was a key player in the original battery project and Fabrice Roudet, its sustainability director, is adamant that the principles of what has been achieved in the Dutch capital are applicable on whatever scale elsewhere.
'A number of stadiums around Europe were built several decades ago and are now grappling with the same questions around how to make their facilities work for the customer, the environment and the business,' he said.
'A stadium can take five years to build, so from the very first day it opens, it's essentially already old from a technology standpoint. And then you have to maintain it over decades, during which you might increase the number of seats, add bars and restaurants and introduce more hospitality facilities. These kinds of changes can make your energy consumption go through the roof and then the conversation about how you power it becomes even more important.
'Not every stadium is going to have two massive batteries like we have in Amsterdam, but every stadium should definitely take into account these kinds of technologies as we all look to significantly reduce the reliance on diesel.
'When you're also able to help the grid, it is well-incentivised, which is a way to have payback on the [original] system.
'The ArenA management saw the value: if you take the example of solar panels, the price of electricity has gone down. But when you look at what happened at the start of the war in Ukraine, the cost to buy from an electricity distributor was much, much higher than the around eight [euro] cents that, over time, it typically costs to produce a kilowatt hour using a big solar system on the roof of a large building.
'At one point, the price of electricity from the grid was five, six, even seven times the cost of your own production. So if you had batteries, your cost of production was increased a little, but it was still really, really worth it financially overall.'
The ArenA has also invested heavily in LED lighting, both to aid pitch growth and to improve the performance of the floodlights, which benefits both those in the stadium and, by eliminating flicker in slow-motion replays, the sharpness of the images served to the television audience and VAR.
Every step of the way, sustainability meshes with innovation, quite literally in the case of the stadium escalators. The energy generated by people riding down is captured and used to offset the energy required to power the movement of those moving up. A giant biodigester transforms food waste from the stadium and local businesses into green energy, which is then fed back into the stadium itself, while water from the nearby Ouderkerkerplas lake is used to cool the dressing rooms and stadium offices. Rainwater from the stadium roof is collected and reused to water the pitch.
Like Murrayfield, the ArenA has diversified into music — Robbie Williams is playing two nights next week, before Imagine Dragons, Stray Kids and Kendrick Lamar take the stage in July — and they report that concert promoters are increasingly using a venue's environmental credentials as a key criterion in their selection process.
'We are seeing that from the general consumer, in this case the match-going fan, as well,' Roudet says. 'People know more about sustainability, what is possible, and what others are doing and so they expect more from businesses and stadiums too.'
Other venues are rising to the challenge. The Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia, has also gone heavy on solar panels and LEDs, while a stormwater management system grants scope to store more than two million gallons on site and reduce flood risk in the surrounding area. These and other water-efficient features mean the stadium uses 47 per cent less water than baseline industry standards.
Back in Europe, the Bluenergy Stadium in Udine, northern Italy, last year installed a smaller-scale version of the ArenA's solar panel/battery combination, while in September 2021 the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium staged the first net-zero football match at elite level, with emissions from a London derby against Chelsea offset into a reforestation project in east Africa and a local tree-planting initiative.
This all sounds a far cry from some of the more fundamental challenges that visitors to Murrayfield experience, particularly if they are a woman who does not want to spend hours queueing for the loos or a parent looking to wash their child's hands with hot water after a half-time bathroom break.
Nonetheless, they do underscore how customer expectation is changing, and how other venues are responding. The lesson, Roudet believes, is to think both big and longer-term.
'Sustainability can sometimes be a hard sell because with things like batteries and ventilation systems, it's not necessarily visible to the public. But then you think of something like the light show the French rugby federation is able to put on with LEDs at the Stade de France now — that's incredibly visible, it improves the fan experience and over time it consumes much less power.
'What [event] organisers and the public need and want from a venue is changing over time, and the most successful stadiums will be those which anticipate and respond to those changes.'