NHL and Honeywell Partner to Enhance Arena Energy Efficiency Across the League

The National Hockey League announced a partnership with multinational conglomerate Honeywell to help arenas, practice facilities and ice rinks be more energy efficient.

Honeywell, a company that helps world organizations solve complex challenges, will be the official building automation and energy partner of the NHL, helping ensure reliable venue operations and a high-quality experience with optimized energy and fewer disruptions during events.

“There’s two general areas of immediate opportunity,” David Lehanski, executive vice president, business development and innovation for the NHL, said in a statement. “The first is to help us in our NHL arenas and facilities to operate more efficiently. The NHL venues that teams currently play in are integrating more technology than ever before. So what’s becoming an even more complex environment to manage, their automation services are going to help us create an efficient way of managing it, and for making sure it’s perfectly calibrated so we can lower costs.

“The other is in the growth of the game at a youth and amateur level. We’re going to help community rinks that are already out there develop a more efficient operating model, so they can hopefully put more money back into the venue, to create a better environment, and to create programming for more kids to play. And together, we will build a blueprint for the future that costs a lot less to develop, so we can get more people interested in building rinks.”

The league aims to make buildings smarter, safer and more efficient while making the fan experience seamless, without attendees ever noticing the work behind the scenes. Honeywell Forge uses artificial intelligence to ensure all systems are integrated, which can help venues be proactive about maintenance.

“We do a lot of city and state work, helping people solve problems where they can’t write a giant check,” said Greg Turner, Chief Solutions Officer, Building Automation for Honeywell. “And yet, their mission is being diverted by their cost of operations. And that’s exactly what we started hearing from the NHL. The big arenas, there’s all kinds of different ownership models, all those different things. You get down to the community rinks, you get down to the practice facilities, most of them are privately owned, and they have a real operating cost.

“This idea that there was something that we knew how to do, and we’ve been doing it for school districts and things for almost 40 years. I said, ‘This business model works. We used it really effectively. Let’s see how I can apply to hockey,’ and it turned out to be a great, great partnership.”

Honeywell well help facilities manage power usage and demands needed to be successful while also being energy efficient, which is essential with most NHL venues having other tenants from other sports leagues and concerts.

“This is not something that is easy,” Turner said. “The challenge is getting even more complicated now because it’s not just about hockey, it’s the fact that these venues are shared with multiple teams and different types of sports that require different ways of managing the venues, and more and more those venues are used for entertainment events, concerts, things that require also a much more automated, intelligent type of infrastructure in order to actually make it make it useful. That’s what we do.”

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/05/21/nhl-partners-with-honeywell-to-optimize-arenas-energy-efficiency/)._