Nearly 4,000 fans, students, alumni and residents of Ann Arbor, Mich., have signed a petition urging the school to install solar at Michigan Stadium. The stadium, with a capacity of 109,901 is likely the largest in the U.S. and would be a great opportunity for the university to show the benefits of solar to the public. The petition effort is spearheaded by the Ecology Center, an activist organization.

“We’re aiming for 10,000 [petition signers]. The university is aware of it, and we hope they’ll meet with us despite not being there yet,” said Monica Patel, a policy specialist with the nonprofit center.

It’s not that the university is against solar. During a recent “Earth Fest” event in September, the school committed to installing photovoltaic arrays on recently acquired research buildings on its north campus, Patel said.

“But we’re hoping for a more visible location,” she said.

She also said it was unclear whether the university or the utility would own the installations and who the end beneficiary of that project would be.

While the university already has committed to solar on some of its buildings, a solar installation at the stadium could have a much greater impact, according to Patel.

“The main reason is visibility and educational impact,” she said.

At this point no installers or contractors have estimated how much solar could be installed either on the stadium or its outlying areas like parking lots.

“We don’t have an idea [of how much solar can be installed],” Patel said. “We’re not engineers. We’re activists and advocates.”

Some preliminary ideas have been offered, however. In 2009, as part of a class project, a group of students evaluated and proposed a solar array for the stadium. The university subsequently asked the Society for Women Engineers to study the site, but thus far no recommendations were announced by the school.

If U-Mich decides to add solar it would join a growing number of sports venues around the world to do so.

National Football League stadiums across the country are adding photovoltaics—from the recently completed array at FexEx Field, home to the Washington Redskins in the mid-Atlantic, to the West Coast Seattle Seahawks, which installed photovoltaics at Qwest Field in the other Washington earlier this year.

Image courtesy of Ecology Center.