energy

What Happened to the Wind Turbines That Twirled Above Philadelphia Eagles' Lincoln Financial Field?

The football stadium's "iconic symbols" of clean energy are being re-evaluated after recent repairs, an Eagles team official says

Large wind turbines twirled for nearly a decade above Lincoln Financial Field, where the Philadelphia Eagles play home games.

They carved out a unique piece of the skyline at the South Philadelphia sports complex, and provided some of the clean energy that the football franchise has boasted of using to power its 69,176-seat stadium.

Now, they're gone, having disappeared in the last couple months as quietly as they spun since installation about eight years ago.

Repairs to some of the turbines led the Eagles to remove all of them recently, and rethink whether to re-install them, an organization official told NBC10.

"We ultimately decided to re-evaluate what to do on this level," Eagles Vice President of Communications Brandon Boone said. "Is there a newer model? Are there bigger ones we could install? Is this the right technology?"

Boone said while the franchise evaluates the turbines' future — if, indeed, there is a future for turbines at the stadium — the team decided not to put the old ones back up.

The wind power generated from the turbines were more "iconic symbols of our commitment to sustainable energy" than they were necessary to the stadium's recent LEED Gold certification, Boone said.

LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is a green-building ranking used globally. There are four tiers: basic, silver, gold and platinum.

The team's more than 11,000 solar panels that shade parking lots surrounding the stadium generate most of the clean energy used to power the Linc, he said.

Between the solar and wind power, the stadium has created about 4 megawatts of carbon-free power each year — roughly a third of the facility's energy consumption each year, according to reports.

The other 8 megawatts are also carbon-offset though clean energy purchases, Boone said.

"All the energy we use, we offset," he said. "Any energy not used from a clean power source, we buy it and offset it 100 percent."

And to any conspiracy theorists out there who thought the turbines may have adversely affected on-field performance, Boone says no way.

"It's actually the opposite. A lot of the players, they always thought they were cool," he said.

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