Energy solutions for sports facilities

The sports facilities are characterized by special energy needs different from any other user and they are characterized by high heat and electricity loads. For this reason, the aim of this work has been to propose a tool to provide a preliminary estimation of the power and energy required by the sports centres. In addition, the possibility to make the building self-energy sufficient has been considered, thanks to the exploitation of renewable energy sources (RES). The overall work has been performed following three steps: energy needs analysis; local RES availability analysis; energy balance of Sport Centres. Considering that each sport facility is characterized by different energy needs depending on the sport typology itself, the analysis started from the features established by the CONI (National Italian Olympic Committee) standardization. For calculations a program in LabVIEW has been developed to evaluate the energy requirements of the sports centre considering as inputs the sport halls, the playgrounds and the supporting rooms, the level of the sport activity (e.g. agonistic) and the climatic conditions of the area where the facilities are located. The locally available RES are evaluated in order to decide which one can be exploited to feed the Sport Centre. The proposed solution for the energy production refers to a combination of different and innovative technologies which involve, in particular, hydrogen technologies. The energy and costs analysis has been finally carried out for an application case in Dubai. (C) 2008 International Association for Hydrogen Energy. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.