Venue News: Santa Clara Boasts Power Plant in Bid for Super Bowl L; HID Lamps Contributed to Length of Superdome Blackout

Compiled by Karen Hogan, Associate Editor, Sports Video Group

Just as Candlestick Park’s nationally televised blackout helped seal the San Francisco 49ers move south, Sunday’s lights-out delay in the Superdome gave Silicon Valley another reason to tout that it literally has the power to host the 50th Super Bowl. The blackout in New Orleans was still largely a mystery Monday, explained only by an unidentified equipment failure that interrupted the nation’s most popular TV event for 34 minutes. It comes as the Bay Area is locked in a high-stakes battle with South Florida to land Super Bowl L in 2016 at the 49ers’ new stadium rising in Santa Clara, which boasts its own power plant and electricity service. Local leaders say there’s no doubt that the normally unsexy topic of electrical utilities will be at the front of NFL team owners’ minds when they pick a winner in May. The Niners’ $1.2 billion stadium, which team owner Jed York has regularly called the “smartest” in the NFL, will be powered by two new electrical substations near the stadium adjacent to the Great America theme park…

…Most sports stadiums and indoor arenas use high intensity discharge (HID) lamps for almost all of their overhead lighting needs. On average, stadium lights have much higher wattage than other outdoor lighting applications such as billboards, roadways, and parking lots. While HID lamps are very efficient, they require significant time to warm up and achieve full brightness after being extinguished. This characteristic contributed to the length of the delay in last Sunday’s Super Bowl game after a power disruption knocked out some of the stadium lighting in the Superdome. As millions of viewers witnessed, last Sunday’s Super Bowl had a 34-minute outage. The New Orleans Superdome uses metal halide lights, a type of HID lamp, as its main overhead lighting in the arena. After the power outage during the Super Bowl, it took several minutes for power to be restored and then more time for the lights to restrike, or achieve full brightness after being extinguished…

…Burst was awarded a contract to design and install a video scoreboard feed system at the Denver Coliseum for the Cutthroats, Denver’s CHL minor league hockey team. The goal of the project was to build a comprehensive integrated video system able to capture and record the action on the ice when Cutthroats are playing, but that can be stored when the Cutthroats are off the ice and other events, like the stock show and the circus, take over the Coliseum.  To achieve this goal, Burst built a flypack system contained on two rolling racks that fit neatly into storage when the system is not in use.  The video system feeds a center-hung, four-sided Daktronics scoreboard installed over center ice. It consists of three Panasonic HPX 370 cameras connected to a Ross Carbonite Plus 16-input switcher. A Tightrope Media Systems ZePlay, 4-input, 4-output slo-motion replay system, a Grass Valley T2 playback server for video inserts, and an AJA KiPro Rack for archiving game video make up this system…

…Construction on a new multipurpose arena that would be home to the Detroit Red Wings could begin before the end of the year, according to a report by Crain’s Detroit Business. Economist Mark Rosentraub, a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan, told writer Bill Shea of Crain’s that the building would likely take as long as two years to build…

…It wouldn’t exactly be described it as a truce, but certainly the noise coming from the San Francisco Giants about the Warriors’ proposal to build an arena on Piers 30-32 has quieted. That’s in part because Mayor Ed Lee convened the teams’ leadership to get them to work out their differences in person, instead of in the media or at public meetings. The Warriors want to build a $1 billion, 17,500-seat arena on the crumbling piers by 2017, when their lease expires in Oakland, and hope to have more than 200 events a year at the new facility. The Giants haven’t exactly been the biggest boosters of the Warriors’ move. On the record, they cite concerns about traffic and accessibility. After all, they’ve got to get people to their 41,915-seat ballpark, too.

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