Now that the summer festival season is over, there’s been one standout feature of 2024 in the United Kingdom, and that is that the future of festivals is battery powered.
For the first time in UK history, stages and even a whole concert event have been powered purely by renewable energy stored in massive on-site batteries. Starting at the almighty Glastonbury Festival in June, the Grid Faeries collective powered the Arcadia stage, before moving on to power the Charlie Gillett stage at WOMAD in July. The final event of the season was providing electricity for the Massive Attack gig on Clifton Downs on the August bank holiday weekend.
The team behind Grid Faeries is one half the non-profit organization AGF (A Greener Future) and the other, Ecotricity, the world’s first green energy company, founded in 1995. Their aim is to make events, festivals and venues become more environmentally friendly.
According to a report from 2019, the UK events industry uses approximately 380 million litres of diesel every year. This amounts to about 1.5% of all UK diesel use and 8% of “red diesel” consumption. What’s more, 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 is released every year, the equivalent to the amount generated by the island of Malta annually.
Renewable Energy Powered Events
With three evets this summer, 2024 saw the first rollout of ACT1.5, a grassroots movement to reduce global warming to 1.5oC. Whilst Glasto and WOMAD were only partly run on renewable energy, the Massive Attack concert was fully compliant. Visitors were brought to the venue on a park & ride system using electric buses, all the food at the event was plant-based, and the power for all the lighting, and equipment, right down to the vendors, was generated by wind and sun and stored in the giant Grid Faeries battery packs.
Trailered into the events, the Grid Faeries power sources are huge, containerised batteries storing energy from wind and solar. They admirably ran the two stages earlier in the summer before running all the power for the festival near Bristol in August.
If you’ve ever been to a festival, behind the scenes, and sometimes not so, diesel generators can be noisy, and smelly. They also emit a lot of carbon. ACT1.5 and the Grid Faeries initiative aims to not just reduce and stop our dependency on fossil fuels, but also make outdoor events more enjoyable for vendors, artists, and visitors alike.
What does 2025 have in store for greener festivals? We don’t know the plans just yet, but it’s likely that Beautiful Days in Devon is a great contender, and the whole of the long Glastonbury weekend would be quite an achievement.
Caltest Instruments has a solution for all your battery, renewable energy, and grid needs. From battery test, charge, and emulator systems to programmable AC and DC loads and even regenerative grid simulators. We even calibrate electrical test equipment in our UKAS-accredited lab.
We have sales and rentals of everything from battery cell test equipment to regenerative grid simulators and AC/DC power sources. We even have our own UKAS-accredited calibration lab onsite in Hampshire.
For all enquiries above equipment to test your off-grid power solutions, call Caltest on 01483 302 700 or complete the contact form.
