Energy Efficiency Gains in Daily Grass Heating Operation of Sports Facilities through Supervisory Holistic Control

In recent reflections on environmental impacts of buildings, medium to large scale sports stadiums have gained substantial attention. These stadiums of e.g.~professional soccer teams are characterized by special system installations like grass heating systems serving the crucial commercial asset(s) and by event-driven usage patterns. Public buildings of this size imply situation-specific operational modes combined with high levels of safety and comfort requirements. In this paper we provide experimental verification of the energy savings potential of a professional soccer stadium's grass heating system during day-to-day operation. Our supervisory holistic control based on state of the art information and communication technology (ICT) is verified by seven experiments which we executed within the real operational setup of the Commerzbank Arena in Frankfurt, Germany. Our experiments operated different control strategies of increasing complexity. In winter 2014/2015 we achieved weather normalized energy savings of more than 56% compared to the last heating season. In an average heating season this would amount to savings of approximately 780 MWh and 150 t CO_2. At the same time we violated minimum temperature targets less than 6% of the time. These results stress the feasibility and benefits of applying holistic context-aware control strategies to large scale legacy consumption systems using supervisory ICT platforms. We demonstrate significant efficiency improvements and establish a new energy baseline that future control strategy evolutions will have to benchmark against.