NHL says the business case starts at community rinks

One of the league's executives started by calling a hockey arena an energy problem. According to Pollstar, Omar Mitchell, the NHL's vice president of innovation and growth strategies, spoke on Sept. 29 in Seattle on a panel at the VenuesNow Conference titled "Building Automation for Good: Energy Efficiency & Business Benefits." He summed it up in one line: "we play in a giant refrigerator."

From NHL arenas down to the local sheet

The newer argument is about the bottom of what Mitchell called the hockey pyramid. Community rinks, he noted, are usually single-use buildings, and he named equipment and ice time as two of the biggest barriers keeping families out of the sport.

Then he connected it to fans. The league says kids who play between ages 5 and 8 are roughly 5 to 6 times more likely to become avid fans. Mitchell framed the planning horizon as the next 20 years, and said the work to build that youth pipeline has to happen now.

Changeover night at a 365-day venue

Stern, Honeywell's senior director of product management for commercial smart buildings, offered the panel's most concrete operating example. She did not name the client, describing it as a top global sports brand from Spain that everybody knows. Honeywell's system, she said, sits at the center of that building and lets it run 365 days a year, in a venue that has to serve many, many different purposes.

Community rinks, which Mitchell described as typically single-use assets, have a simpler problem. They don't change over between events.

Where the savings math comes from

Published savings benchmarks deserve a careful reading before anyone applies them to ice. For operators who, in Mitchell's words, play in a giant refrigerator, occupancy-based savings should not be assumed to transfer. Lighting, ventilation and the spectator areas are the parts most likely to behave like an ordinary commercial building.

Energy alone may not carry the business case, and the research literature says so plainly. A 2023 review in Buildings, published by MDPI, looked at building automation in office environments and noted that a significant portion of energy efficiency measures have been found not cost-effective enough if only energy savings are considered, so investors have started to look into additional benefits. In offices those benefits include higher employee productivity and fewer sick days. In a venue, the benefits could be different.

The test sits at the bottom of the pyramid

NHL arenas will be the visible part of this partnership. The league's own argument, though, rests on the community rink: the single-use building where ice time limits who gets to play.