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Julie’s Bicycle makes recommendations for more energy efficient festivals
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 15 November 2011
The UK Festival Report, to be published later today at the UK Festival Conference in London town, will, among other things, reveal that UK music festivals collectively consume twelve million litres of diesel every year, generating an estimated 48,000MWh of electricity and 31,600t of CO2 emissions.
Which probably means nothing to you, but basically that’s a lot. In fact, the energy use of the festival sector could power 10,000 homes for year. That’s in no small part because of the inefficiency of the diesel generators used by festival managers, which often run at an average of 40% fuel efficiency.
These stats come from research work done by the University Of Sussex, the Power Providers Forum and music industry environmental group Julie’s Bicycle, who together set out to review the eco-creds of British festivals with a view to offering advice to promoters as to how they might make their events more green.
Among the recommendations to be made as a result of the research, are that festivals look to reduce their energy use by rationalising generator use, using more efficient PA and lighting kit, looking into the use of renewable energy sources and/or waste vegetable oil biodiesel (which currently meets 3-6% of festival power demand), and reviewing tour bus operations with regards energy usage.
Julie’s Bicycle Director Alison Tickell told CMU: “Mapping power supply across UK festivals was identified by the Power Provider’s Forum as the first joint step towards building a sustainable festival sector. This research reveals the scale of opportunity, the strength of commitment and the missed tricks. Our second step will be to focus on a small number of joint actions to make the difference”.
