Lighting is one of the bigger expenses for modern sports venues, which can cover anything from a recreational baseball field all the way up through the largest of professional football stadiums.
According to Sports Light Supply, a modern LED lighting system for recreational soccer and baseball fields can run from $20,000 to $50,000. The lighting for a modern high school football stadium meanwhile may boost that cost up to $100,000 to $300,000. And then the kind of lighting systems you find in modern professional stadiums can run anywhere from $250,000 to $1 million.
Why such a range? Simply, the size of the venue that needs to be lit with the lighting requirements, which in the case of professional sports stadiums means lighting sufficient to support the televised broadcast of games. Traditionally, that means huge banks of powerful lights mounted on dedicated structures projecting high above the grandstands surrounding the field they are lighting.
But what if instead of all that dedicated structure, you could simply mount powerful lights on drones and fly them above the field where they could light up the action like the sun?
That's the thinking behind Freefly Systems' Flying Sun concept featured in the following 45-second video. Check it out:
As featured in the video, the initial application would be to provide overhead lighting for nighttime roadwork, construction projects, and emergency response applications. But if it proves effective for these uses, drone-based lighting systems for sports venues won't be far behind.
At this writing, Freefly is selling its "Flying Sun" drones for anywhere from $50,000 to $60,000 each.
That represents new product pricing with the potential to fall significantly if the demand for the innovation results in their being produced at higher volumes. They're just being rolled out commercially this month, so whether drone-based outdoor lighting systems becomes an established product category is now up to the marketplace.