Has Hell frozen over? Is NASCAR going green? Well, yes and no. As company execs assured us at the recent Daytona 500 race, the races themselves will continue to be the noisy paean to petroleum that brings in so many millions of fans. However, there’s a lot that can be done both on and off the track to reduce the enterprise’s overall emissions.
Under the rubric NASCAR Impact, the racing series aims to reduce its carbon footprint to zero across its core operations by 2035. As regular readers know, your correspondent can sniff out greenwashing like a truffle hound, but I do believe there’s something to the plans. NASCAR has partnered with a couple of sustainability leaders—ABB and FPL—and has already taken some concrete steps. NASCAR has joined the Clean Energy Buyers Association, and is deploying solar energy and EV charging stations at some of its venues.
At the Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR just commissioned 30 Level 2 charging stations, in collaboration with electrical infrastructure giant ABB and utility Florida Power & Light, which has a solar canopy at the racetrack and massive solar farms all over the state.
“What we race every weekend is a combustion engine, but there’s still a lot of opportunity to focus on how we can make our own operations as a sport more sustainable,” Riley Nelson, NASCAR’s Head of Sustainability, told Charged in Daytona. “From an energy standpoint, we’re looking at our facilities, our race tracks, the energy mix of our buildings.”
“From a vehicle fleet standpoint, we bring [dozens of] 18-wheelers around the country. We have construction vehicles, trams, trucks. A lot of those can be electrified. That’s a big part of our plan and that’s why it’s so important that we have a partner like ABB, because they have the technology and expertise to support us in the transition to electric vehicles.”
I asked if NASCAR has reached the stage of talking with electric truck suppliers. “Mack Truck is our official partner in the long-haul fleet space, and we’re working with them on some different decarbonization roadmaps,” Ms. Nelson told me. “For smaller truck operations, Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota are our three OEMs. Ford has already expressed interest, so we’re working with them on what the future of our fleet makeup looks like, whether it’s electric trucks or a mixture of EVs and hybrids.”
“Today we’re officially unveiling 30 new Level 2 ABB chargers, also in partnership with Florida Power & Light,” Riley continued. “This is one of the biggest projects we have right now in the charging space, but there are other Level 2 back-of-house chargers as well. This is a crucial first step as we think about electrification. It might take a few months or a few years to switch over the bigger classes of vehicles, but we’re installing those chargers now so employees can drive their own electric vehicles to work and plug in.”
Will some of these chargers be available to the public? “Yes, that’s the plan. The hope would be that every track does have charging. The ones we opened up today and the other ones we’ve installed over the past couple months are for employee use—employees will get a card and they’ll be free to use.”
Source: NASCAR, CleanTechnica