Dive Brief:
- Honeywell and the National Hockey League have formed a multi-year partnership to help facilities managers at NHL rinks meet increasing power and cooling demands and improve uptime, the organizations announced Wednesday.
- "By optimizing building automation and energy management … the League [is seeking] more resilient, digitally enabled facilities that reduce operating costs, protect revenue streams and deliver seamless, secure and high‑quality fan experiences," Juan Picon, Americas president of building automation at Honeywell, said in a statement.
- More than 23 million people attended NHL regular-season games this season, the fourth consecutive year of record attendance, according to the league. Hockey programs hosted by the league, its teams and its players are also seeing record growth in participation, the NHL says.
Dive Insight:
The NHL says it will be using Honeywell’s enterprise performance management platform, called Forge, in the partnership. The platform provides facilities operators with predictive analytics to help them optimize the heating, cooling and other building management systems deployed at the venue.
"Our business requires an unprecedented level of interconnectivity and flexibility to deliver best-in-class experiences vital to the game on the ice and the fan experience off the ice," said David Lehanski, NHL executive vice president of business development and innovation.
One of the goals is to reduce facility downtime, which can help venues protect revenue streams and generate new revenue, Honeywell says.
“Scalable and AI-enabled building automation technologies [can] help facilities … improve uptime for revenue-critical operations and enable reliable, uninterrupted events,” the company says. “Digitally enabled facilities [can also] reduce operating costs [and] protect revenue streams."
The two organizations say more value from the partnership will come in the years ahead as teams modernize their building systems and leverage the data they generate from the systems to improve their operations.
The “rink of the future,” as they put it, will be more efficient, connected, secure and resilient. “By reimagining how arenas and rinks are designed and operated, the collaboration aims to shape the next generation of hockey facilities,” the organizations said in their release.
Honeywell has already partnered with local hockey rinks to improve efficiency and operations, working with Ramsey County, Minnesota, to automate operations at 10 county-managed ice rinks.
To better manage challenges, like keeping the ice sheet cold while maintaining heat and air quality levels for visitor comfort and controlling humidity levels to avoid structural damage, Honeywell is adding automated building management systems in the county’s ice rinks to optimize heating, cooling and ice conditions based on usage, the company announced in November. Additionally, the project will add solar panels to two of the county’s largest ice rinks and add refrigerant detection upgrades at four other rinks, alongside LED lighting and building envelope improvements.
“In tandem, enhanced HVAC controls — which support scheduling and CO2 monitoring — will help boost efficiency, improve refrigerant leak detection and reduce operating costs,” Honeywell said.
