When the first pitch leaves the mound on opening day, millions of watts are already working overtime. Baseball is America's pastime — and powering it is serious business.

Walk into any major league ballpark on a summer evening and you feel it: the radiance of field lighting cutting through the dusk, the concession equipment running at full tilt, the cool of an air-conditioned club level, the giant scoreboard cycling through replays. It’s an experience built as much on energy as on athleticism.

What most fans never think about — but what every stadium operator thinks about constantly — is the amount of natural gas and electricity required to make a single game happen. And for businesses in energy-intensive industries, the challenges MLB stadiums face offer a surprisingly useful mirror.

The numbers behind the national pastime

The scale is hard to wrap your head around at first. A typical MLB game draws between 30,000 and 45,000 fans, and keeping them comfortable, fed, and entertained demands a lot of energy from the moment gates open to the last out.

A typical MLB game can draw anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 kWh of electricity — equivalent to what a dozen or more American homes use in an entire month, all burned in just a few hours — comes from a combination of demands that any large commercial facility operator will recognize immediately.

Where the energy actually goes

A ballpark isn’t one building — it’s dozens of energy systems running simultaneously. Field lighting alone can account for a substantial share of a night game’s load. But the full picture is much broader.

Primary energy consumers on game day:

• Field & venue lighting — High demand
• HVAC & climate control — High demand
• Concessions & food service — Medium demand
• Scoreboards & broadcasting — Medium demand
• Water heating & plumbing — Lower demand
• Elevators, escalators & transit — Lower demand

Natural gas plays a particularly important role behind the scenes — powering the water heating systems that serve tens of thousands of fans, fueling commercial kitchen equipment across dozens of concession stands, and providing backup heating for enclosed or partially covered stadiums during cold-weather games.

Teams stepping up to the plate on efficiency

The good news is that MLB franchises have made remarkable strides in managing their energy footprint — and the results show what’s possible when organizations treat energy as a strategic priority rather than a fixed cost.

Seattle Mariners — T-Mobile Park

In 2015, T-Mobile Park became the first MLB stadium to install LED field lighting — reducing power usage by 784,000 kWh per season and saving more than $50,000 annually in energy costs alone.

Cleveland Guardians — Progressive Field

Progressive Field has long been a sustainability leader, installing an onsite solar energy system that now powers the stadium's more than 400 televisions.

San Francisco Giants — Oracle Park

Oracle Park installed MLB’s first solar array in 2007 and  became the first MLB ballpark to earn LEED certification for an existing building — achieving Silver (2010), Gold (2015), and Platinum (2019), the only ballpark in the country to earn all three.

St. Louis Cardinals — Busch Stadium

Busch Stadium’s “4 a Greener Game” initiative, launched in 2008, helped cut overall energy use by 20% and water use by 10% — achieved through lighting upgrades, enhanced insulation, and improved HVAC and refrigeration systems.

What stadiums teach the rest of us

Here’s why this matters far beyond baseball: the energy challenges an MLB stadium faces are the same ones — at different scales — that manufacturers, hospitals, universities, hotels, and large commercial facilities face every single day. Predictable high-demand periods. Simultaneous loads across multiple systems. The need to balance cost control with reliability and sustainability goals.

The teams seeing the biggest savings aren’t just swapping out light bulbs. They’re taking a comprehensive approach: locking in favorable energy pricing, auditing where their biggest loads are, and pairing that with smart infrastructure upgrades. That’s exactly the conversation UGI Energy Services has with commercial customers across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.

We supply natural gas and electricity to more than 42,000 customer locations — from manufacturers and food processors to healthcare systems and educational institutions. And like a good pitching coach, we don’t just hand you the ball. We work with you to understand the full picture: your usage patterns, your risk tolerance, your sustainability commitments, and how to build a supply strategy that holds up over a long season.

Renewable energy: the next inning

The direction the league is heading is clear: more solar, more LED efficiency, more renewable sourcing. Washington’s Nationals Park was the first MLB stadium to earn LEED silver certification for new construction. Several teams are now exploring on-site generation that could eventually allow stadiums to feed energy back to the grid.

For businesses thinking about their own energy future, the MLB experience is a useful roadmap. Renewable natural gas, green electricity options, and sustainability reporting support are no longer niche offerings — they’re becoming table stakes for organizations with ESG commitments and stakeholders who are paying attention. UGI Energy Services offers all of them.

The next time you settle into your seat at the ballpark and watch the lights come to life over the diamond, think about what it takes to make that happen — and what it means for your own facility’s energy program. The best operators in any industry don’t leave energy to chance. They have a plan.

Ready to step up to the plate?

Schedule a free 7-minute consultation with a UGIES energy advisor. Visit www.ugies.com/schedule-a-7-minute-consultation or call 1.800.427.8545.