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City Light Helps Mariners Score With Energy Efficiency

Seattle City Light is helping the Seattle Mariners improve the fan experience at Safeco Field while cutting energy consumption.

Seattle City Light is helping the Seattle Mariners improve the fan experience at Safeco Field while cutting energy consumption.

The Mariners are replacing the 10-year-old incandescent lights in the out-of-town scoreboard at the baseball stadium with energy efficient LED light bundles. The scoreboard will provide full-color, animated displays about other games in progress. The “gee-whiz” features are boosted by the energy-saving LED technology. The new scoreboard will use about one tenth of the electricity needed to run the old one.

Workers install the new, energy efficient out-of-town scoreboard at Safeco Field. The new scoreboard uses LEDs and will consume one tenth the electricity of the old one.

The Safeco Field project also will replace metal halide screw-in bulbs for the Hall of Fame artwork lights and replace halogen lights in the suite level corridors and the Mariners team store.

“With energy efficient technology, you can have it all – a better product and lower electricity bills,” City Light Director of Conservation Resources Bob Balzar said. “We hope the Mariners’ new scoreboard encourages other businesses and homeowners to get in the game and make sustainable energy choices as well.”

Altogether, Seattle City Light will provide about $185,000 in incentives for the project. The new equipment is expected to reduce the Mariners’ energy consumption by more than 900,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year.  That’s enough to power 100 typical Seattle homes for a year. It also avoids about 540 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is the equivalent of taking 119 cars off the road.

“Since 2006 we have saved more than $1 million in utility expenses through conservation efforts of our staff and better use of building automation,” said Scott Jenkins, the Mariners’ vice president for ballpark operations. “Our mantra has been to do at work what you’d do at home when you are paying the bill.  My hope is that these types of results will inspire others to undertake similar efforts to improve the bottom line and reduce environmental impacts.”

Seattle City Light is the ninth largest public electric utility in the United States.  It has the lowest cost customer rates of any urban utility, providing reliable, renewable and environmentally responsible power to nearly 1 million Seattle area residents.  City Light has been greenhouse gas neutral since 2005, the first electric utility in the nation to achieve that distinction.