FENWAY TRADITION MEETS SOLAR INNOVATION

Baseball, once identified absolutely with sunshine and green grass, is now a game played largely under artificial lights and too often on artificial turf. Nowhere, however, is baseball’s sense of tradition more alive and well than Boston’s Fenway Park.

As the park’s resident Red Sox return to a year-by-year league dominance the team hasn’t known since the beginning of the last century, it is also returning to the sunshine of their first heyday by installing a solar energy system to heat stadium water.

Solid on tradition, the Red Sox took 86 years to fully let go of their haphazard ways in 2004 – and, bless their souls, they never gave up on real grass or good right handed pitching.

Fenway: A field of dreams under the sun. (click to enlarge)

Solar panels unveiled at Fenway
Andrew Ryan, May 19, 2008 (Boston Globe)
and
groSolar to Bring Solar Power to Fenway Park
May 18, 2008 (groSolar)

WHO
The Boston Red Sox, resident champions of Fenway Park; National Grid; Solar Boston; groSolar

System installers.

WHAT
Fenway Park is putting in a rooftop solar panel hot water system.

WHEN
- Fenway Park is 96 years old and synonymous with Major League Baseball’s century-and-a-half sense of tradition.
- The Fenway installation is part of Solar Boston, a $600,000 initiative to increase the Boston's solar energy output 50-fold by 2015.

Schematic of a solar hot water system. (click to enlarge)

WHERE
Fenway Park is in Boston. It was the scene of the earliest great World Series games, it was the place where Babe Ruth started his career, it was the place where Ted Williams, the game’s greatest pure hitter, played out his career and it is the place where the Red Sox finally overcame the 86-year-old Curse of the Bambino in 2004.

WHY
- groSolar will do the installation: 28 solar hot water heaters, 4 400-gallon storage tanks
- The Green Monster, 37-feet high, lives in Fenway Park’s left field.
- The new solar installation will supply 37% of the hot water used in the stadium.
National Grid, which has committed $75,000 to Solar Boston.
- Solar Boston will identify the city’s south-facing roofs, market to business- and residence-owners and work with them to finance installations. It seeks to take the city from it’s current 0.5 megawatt solar capacity to 25 megawatts.
- Solar Boston funding: $150,000 from the U.S. DOE matched by the City of Boston plus $250,000 in technical assistance from DOE and $50,000 from the state of Massachusetts.
- The city is also funding $1 million in solar installations on municipal buildings (Brighton High School, The Strand Theatre, Tobin Community Center, the West Roxbury Branch Library, etc.)
- Boston’s Green Affordable Housing Program that has built $2 million in solar installations on 6 city development rooftops.

The Babe, The Splendid Splinter and Solar Energy, the heart of the line-up. (click to enlarge)

QUOTES
- James Hunt, environmental and energy services chief, Boston: "The program is designed to jump-start widespread solar installations throughout Boston with a public-private partnership…"
- Thomas M. Menino, Mayor, Boston: "[The goal is to] make clean, abundant, and
affordable solar energy the norm and no longer an alternative source of energy."
- Kelli Pippin, Marketing Director, groSolar: “We are honored to assist Fenway and the City of Boston in their drive and determination to ‘turn Bean Town into Green Town’, as Mayor Menino so eloquently puts it…Solar is our forte and it’s also the cleanest, greenest weapon we know of in the fight against global warming."