Turkish football saves almost €400,000 from its Solar roof

A legendary Turkish football club has found a way to cut its energy costs and make money from electricity while going green.

Galatasaray football club previously set a world record in March for the amount of megawatts produced by the stadium’s solar panels, earning it a place in the Guinness World Records.

The club and the energy company running the system, Enerjisa, were presented with a certificate acknowledging the feat of producing 4.2 megawatts from 10,404 panels on the roof of the Ali Sami Yen Spor Kompleksi Stadium in Istanbul.

Galatasaray are used to winning. They’re one of Turkey’s biggest four football clubs, alongside Beşiktaş, Fenerbahçe, and Trabzonspor, pulling in around 25,000 to a match on average.

But with many Europeans worried about how to pay their energy bills, the title of most powerful solar-powered stadium sets an inspiring example beyond the sporting world.

According to the stadium’s director Ali Çelikkıran, who is an electric engineer by training, the panels’ energy savings equate to the energy use of 2,000 houses and will cut 3,250 tonnes of carbon per year. In natural terms, he estimates that’s the same as saving around 200,000 trees over 25 years.

Aside from cutting costs, solar energy is also leading to a new income source for Galatasaray, a heavily-decorated national sports club that won the 2000 UEFA Cup.

The club buys all the energy that is produced from the panels from Enerjisa, but with the stadium only fully using its lighting system for 150 hours during 25 matches a year, it gets more electricity than it needs so the rest is sold to the municipality.