To meet the Super Bowl’s tremendous power demands, three independent power sources are controlled to ensure that any one power system can’t take the show off-air.
What does it take to pull off Super Bowl-level power? Just ask CAT Entertainment Services, which serviced Super Bowl LI with 16 technicians and provided 8,600 kW of generator power, 1,300 kVA of UPS-supported power, and more than 7 miles of cable.
As CAT’s VP/GM Greg Landa mentioned in a recent article discussing the endeavor, “The technical side of the Super Bowl production is using shore power with UPS riding over it for redundancy and generators ultimately backing up the shore power.” The set-up involves six 500-kW diesel generators, two 375-kVA UPS generators, and two smaller 80-kVA UPS generators that match house power to eliminateissues in case of a changeover.
As he notes in the article: “The beauty of having the UPS online is that it offers redundancy and cleans up the house power by filtering out bad power so we don’t need to deal with sags or spikes. It also offers fuel savings as the diesel generators kick in only when there is a power outage.”
The goal is to offer three independent power sources to ensure that any one power system could not take the show off-air.
In the past, monitoring all these systems required going from one to the next with a meter and continually writing down readings. This year’s Super Bowl took a much easier and more modern approach thanks to support from Opto 22.
