Launched as part of Energy Day at COP28, a call has been made for sports teams and industries to integrate renewable energy technologies into their operations.

The Portable Off-Grid Power Blueprint provides a manual for sports to move towards renewal power and use their considerable influence to inspire people across the globe to do the same.

An initiative of Low Carbon and sailing enterprise Emirates GBR, the Blueprint provides organisations with the knowledge, information and contacts needed to integrate renewable energy into their operations.

Low Carbon and Emirates GBR decided to create the blueprint due to the success of the bespoke solar and wind installation developed as part of their partnership. The installation, that consists of 38 solar panels and two micro wind turbines, travels around the world to Sail Grand Prix events with Emirates GBR and has taken the Team’s operations off-grid, while also producing enough energy to power other SailGP Teams.

The Emirates GBR SailGP Team and Low Carbon partnered in January 2023 as the two entities wanted to harness the power of sport and athletes to inspire positive change on a global scale. The Portable Off-Grid Power Blueprint is the next step in the partnership and will enable other sports teams and industries to make use of readily available technology and join the fight against the climate crisis.

The Blueprint has been published as part of Energy Day at the COP28 conference and ahead of the final SailGP race of 2023 taking place in Dubai on 9 and 10 December.

Emirates GBR driver and CEO, Sir Ben Ainslie, said: “As a sports team we are privileged to be able to travel around the world doing what we love, but we are aware that this has an impact. As a Team, we wanted to take action and incorporate renewable energy into our operations so that we were not drawing from resources of the communities at event locations. Our partnership with Low Carbon enabled us to create a unique mobile solar and wind installation that takes us off-grid at events. It has been a huge success and we decided to share all the learnings from creating and implementing this to other sports teams and industries to make it easy and simple for them to adopt renewable energy. There is no reason to not take action, climate change is happening now and by working together we can make a difference.”

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