Towards Zero Energy Stadiums: the case study of the Dacia Arena in Udine, Italy

The environmental impacts of famous sportive events have been growing during the recent decades leading the main organizing associations to develop adequate countermeasures for both reducing and compensating carbon emissions due to the construction and the operation stages. The present work aims to propose an approach to stadiums’ energy enhancement that includes strategies largely recognized as effective and already applied to several building typologies such as residential, commercial and academic. The case study investigated is the Dacia Arena in Udine that has been recently refurbished and renovated. The Arena has been assessed in order to reduce the increasing of operational emissions caused by the new heated areas recently realized for improving the services offered to users. Firstly, the stadium’s energy consumption was estimated in dynamic state for the Scenario 0 (current state) and the Scenario 1 (renovated state) for quantifying the requirements to the new plants. Secondly, two hypothesis of system layout were proposed and compared. On the first, power for lighting, cooling and heating is supplied by a system which couples photovoltaic panels with heat pump, while in the second the same photovoltaic plant is integrated with a biomass plant and an absorption chiller. The comparison highlights the suitability of those interventions and the environmental advantages deriving from the biomass exploitation instead of geothermal energy.