The Olympic venues where the athletes compete use enormous quantities of air-conditioning and refrigerant formulas. This is the third article in Riverdeep Today's Summer Olympics series. The Sydney Olympic Athletes Village is the world's first solar-powered village. Because of these design features, the energy requirements of the village are cut by half. Most of the required energy is produced by solar power, gathered from rooftop solar panels.
Street lighting is also solar-powered.
The Olympic Athletes Village will produce 1 million kilowatt-hours of energy a year, equivalent to the output of a small power station. This represents a saving of 7,000 tons of CO 2 a year from the burning of fossil fuels that contribute to global warming. You can learn to calculate kilowatt-hours and power of electricity in the Middle School Gateways activity, Electric Power . The environmental group Greenpeace helped draft Sydney's environmental policies for the 2000 Games, which were then passed as law by the New South Wales government. Since then, Greenpeace has issued report cards that grade Sydney on its success in carrying out these policies.