Green Galatasaray: Turkish football giant 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.

While the club has money to spend on players, it does not have much cash to invest in its energy system, so Çelikkıran was on the look-out for a way to cut costs.

“Nowadays, [whether] they want or not want, a big company must be an environmentalist because energy is very expensive,” the director tells Euronews Green.

The solar energy produced from the panels provides between 63 to 65 per cent of the stadium’s electricity use, with the rest coming from the municipal electricity provider.

While electricity prices have risen, the price for the solar energy -