The redbirds are turning green. It's not some blight changing cardinals’ colors, it's solar panels at Busch Stadium where the World Champion Saint Louis Cardinals play.
The photovoltaics should pump out 32,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity this year. To put that in baseball terms, that's enough to cook 4 million hot dogs.
Saint Louis actually has a long history with solar, hosting one of the earliest solar power plants for the World's Fair in 1904. And with climate change threatening to shift the habitat of the birds that the baseball team takes its name from, well, every little bit of clean energy helps.
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And it's not just Saint Louis. Across the state, the Kansas City Royals also have solar panels, as do the Arizona Diamondbacks, Boston Red Sox, Colorado Rockies, San Francisco Giants, and Cleveland Indians.
In fact, Cleveland's ball field also boasts a spiral wind turbine designed to generate power even from relatively weak winds. While other teams may benefit from the wind for power hitting, the Indians will be the only ones to harvest the power in gusts to generate electricity. Now if they could only win a championship.
—David Biello
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]
