The Super Bowl is exactly three months away and aside from who will play in the NFL championship game, the big question is—will the power stay on this year?
At last year's Super Bowl in New Orleans, a new electric relay device failed during the third quarter and plunged the Superdome into partial darkness, delaying the matchup between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers by 34 minutes.
But it wasn’t the first time a major sporting event was disrupted by a power outage and fans were left steaming.
SPORTS AND OUTAGES
On Oct. 15, an outage delayed Game 3 of the Major League Baseball playoff series between the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers at Comerica Park in Detroit. The lights went out at 4:42 p.m. but umpires stopped play until the power was restored because of overcast skies. Power was back almost instantaneously, but it took 17 minutes for the lights to return. DTE Electric’s CEO said it was caused by a “random cable failure.”
In December of 2011, Candlestick Park in San Francisco went dark in an NFL game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. First, a transformer outside the stadium blew up and the opening kickoff was delayed by 20 minutes. Then, in the second quarter, power was lost again for more than 15 minutes.
In November of 2010, an NFL game between the New York Giants and the Dallas Cowboys at the New Meadowlands Stadium (now MetLife Stadium) was disrupted twice by outages. In the first instance “ one of two feeders to the stadium experienced a power interruption,” stadium officials said at the time. Most lighting in the stadium was lost for about three minutes. Then, eight minutes later, the second feeder to the stadium failed, and a full outage occurred and the game was halted. It took about 20 minutes for the stadium lights to return to normal.
But is there a pattern here or are these one-off events whose importance is magnified because they play havoc with fans’ enjoyment of their favorite sports?
THE GRIDONOMICS OF STADIUM OUTAGES
“The simple answer is that every one is a one-off event,” said Mark McGranaghan, vice president of power delivery and utilization at the Electric Power Research Institute.
“The lighting systems in stadiums make the outage look longer that it is,” he said. “It takes those lights as long as 30 minutes to cool down to be restarted,” he said, referring to High Intensity Discharge (HID) lighting that is the most common form used in stadiums because of their high lumen output, long life and low maintenance costs.
“We don’t have a lighting technology to replace” HID, McGranaghan said in an interview. HID has “been around for a long time” and the challenge for the lighting industry is to develop more efficient lights and reduce cooling time to 8-10 minutes, he said.
Another solution would be “to have more expensive backup systems that can ride through even the very momentary disturbances.”
The actual power outage event is generally momentary, McGranaghan explained. But as an EPRI study conducted just after the Super Bowl outage found, “once sensitive systems go offline, they must be allowed sufficient time to restart, reboot, cool and re-strike, or reinitialize.”
In addition to lighting, there is the issue of increasing loads—that can be in the tens of megawatts—at large stadiums, driven by the explosion of luxury boxes, mega-scoreboards and communications. Also, “there is an issue of aging infrastructure” both inside and outside of a stadium, McGranaghan said.
WILL A BLACKOUT HAPPEN AGAIN THIS YEAR?
A recent test of electrical system at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey was successful, according to Al Kelly, head of the host committee for the game, which will be the first Super Bowl played at a cold-weather site. The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority (NJSEA) recently completed a major upgrade of their substation and electric system at the Sports Complex.
As for PSE&G, the electric utility serving the stadium, the company “accelerated some of our planned transmission work and circuit upgrades in the area. Our long-term plans called for the installation of a mobile transformer into Carlstadt to support the summer 2015 load. We rearranged our work schedule and the mobile was freed up early. Since Carlstadt is less than a mile from the Sports Complex, it was decided to install the mobile transformer at the Sports Complex to serve as emergency backup to the normal PSE&G circuits during the big game,” said spokeswoman Kristine Lloyd.
PSE&G also “reached out to Entergy to discuss what happened last year, and we contacted the manufacturer of the relay that was involved to discuss the issue. In fact, we reached out to the utilities that hosted the past five Super Bowls to discuss lessons learned and what worked best for them, and implemented recommendations that were reasonable for us,” she added.
“We did run the tests last month that Al Kelly referred to, and they revealed some small issues that were addressed. The final step is to be prepared for any contingency on game day.”
"The load at MetLife stadium during the game is expected to be 18 megawatts, but 6 megawatts will be on generator power supplied by the Super Bowl,” Lloyd said. The broadcast and the halftime show, for example, will be run on such generators.
So sports fans, do not be concerned. Anything that can be done to prevent another Super Bowl outage seems to have already been done.
Just don’t dwell on the fact that the electrical systems in the New Orleans Superdome last year were virtually brand new, having been replaced in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
We’ll see what happens on Feb. 2.
