Event Insights

The Challenge

Immunity to energy price spikes doesn’t exist, even at the upper echelons of the UK’s top sporting clubs. This iconic institution, a customer of ours for over a decade, wanted to tackle rising costs and meet ambitious ESG targets by reducing its energy and carbon consumption. This demanded rigorous analysis of energy use across their portfolio in order to identify areas for action. 

The challenge was that the stadium isn’t just used for our client’s sporting fixtures but also for hosting music concerts and exhibitions, alongside other sports. With such a large range of variables relating to consumption, how could our client get the breadth of visibility needed to inform their approach? 

Our client was keen to:

• Combat rising energy costs and understand the behavioural patterns behind excessive usage.
• Gain significant visibility of multiple hotspots to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprint.
• Interpret the relationship between different event types and the energy used.
• Reduce carbon output to meet the UK government requirement to be net zero by 2050.

The Solution

Trident’s Event Insight function enabled our analysts to scrutinise 24 months of half-hourly data for multiple gas and electricity meters on site. We factored in the date and time of each event, the event type (including competition details for fixtures), attendance and much more, processing everything through our data analytic software, Pulse.

The results demonstrated an average 111% uplift in daily energy consumption when an event occurred, but there was no standardised effect. The fluctuation between the highest and lowest consumption was a huge 65%, translating to an extra £6,500 in costs. There was also a significant variance between the maximum and minimum daily consumption, equating to a difference of £8,000 in energy costs.

With the help of this data, several site visits and equipment operational analysis, we worked with the venue to identify multiple opportunities for improving energy efficiency and mitigating excessive usage. These opportunities included:

• BMS Control improvements.
• Motor control strategy.
• Event plant timing strategy.
• HVAC Optimisation.
• Behavioural change.

Crucially, none of the proposals would detract from the customer experience expected by every visitor. In fact, greater control would instead lead to fewer complaints and lower energy bills.

The Benefits

In total, our suggested changes resulted in predicted savings of £493,000 a year, for an estimated capital cost of £429,000. The benefit also extended way beyond the balance sheet to support meeting the client’s net-zero targets and reducing their emissions by 362 tonnes of CO₂e, the same amount as would be released by felling 18,000 trees a year or driving a VW Up for over 2 million miles.