Coal, solar companies claim Super Bowl outage makes their case

The Super Bowl power outage (which the NFL says was not Beyoncé’s fault) has fast become a proverbial Rorschach test for energy companies touting radically different technologies.

The company NRG Energy provides a solar power system for the 2014 Super Bowl venue, and it used the outage at the New Orleans Superdome to tout the New Jersey MetLife Stadium's “solar ring,” while also acknowledging its limits.

“You never realize just how important power is until the lights go out. In case you didn't know, MetLife Stadium will be hosting next year’s big game and is armed with a Solar Ring system that was designed, installed and is operated by NRG. It will provide sustainable power to the stadium,” NRG said on its Facebook page.

“While the solar ring would not prevent an outage, it is a first step in incorporating other energy solutions critical to the ongoing operations of the stadium,” NRG said.

But for Peabody Energy, a major coal producer, the message was quite different. The coal giant’s CEO said the outage “offered a convincing visual demonstration to counter those who have envisioned a world without coal.”

“Without coal, you might as well turn off half the lights not just for our favorite games but also for our cities, shops, factories and homes,” CEO Gregory H. Boyce said in a statement Monday.

The claim has limited application to the Super Bowl. While officials are still investigating what exactly happened, Entergy Corp., the utility that provides power to the Superdome, has said there wasn’t a problem on its end.

And The Wall Street Journal, taking stock of Peabody's statement, notes that even if it had been a supply problem, the vast majority of power in Entergy’s New Orleans unit comes from nuclear or natural gas-fired generation.

NRG’s Crane, for his part, said on CNBC Tuesday morning that the 1,300-panel MetLife Stadium solar system provides 400 kilowatts, which is a very small fraction of the 18 megawatts of power that he said the New Jersey stadium needs on game days.

Still, he said more broadly that extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy reveal the usefulness of so-called "distributed sources" of power like solar panels when the grid is disrupted.

“In the era of extreme weather that we are entering, the grid is going to get torn down,” he said. “It is insane to have a 21st century economy that is based on wooden poles, and now the technology exists for people to have more distributed generation.”

What’s clear is that the Super Bowl problem may be putting new focus on energy policy and delivery.

“Who would have known,” Crane quipped on CNBC, “that electricity could be interesting.”