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0% CO2 - 100% festival
For several years OrangeCamp has supported the climate, environment and humanitarian projects, but in 2009 we had set ourselves a bigger target for the Roskilde Festival, which succeeded to the full. OrangeCamp accomplished, as the first, to create festival with lots of live music and DJ sets, where all sound and light were powered by renewable energy produced on site.
Before we started the project, we were well aware that it would be a major task. We would have a full program of live music and DJ's during the warm up days and then later on more DJ's, but still with live acts presented as happenings.
The greatest challenge was of course to gain enough power, but also in a safe manner. Further, the full setup needed to be trimmed to get the most effective use of the power we were able to produce.
We chose to focus on solar energy because it is a reliable power source and almost without security issues. With this solution, we would have a reasonably stable output. Conversely, it made great demands on our ability to retain power, since we only could charge in daylight hours and a lot of our events were in the dark hours.
During our work with the project we soon realized that what you could buy were still in the early developing stages resulting in both the supply and the functions of the systems were very limited and more expensive than traditional equipment. Therefore we chose to build almost everything ourselves and purchase only the necessary basic components.
The things we had to build was: A system for managing and storing power, mounting hardware for solar panels, sound system and a comprehensive LED Lighting system to be built from scratch including a controller.
Power
We had several demands to our power system. It should be safe, easy to manage and it should be able to be taken apart to take a minimum of space during transport and storage. The solution was to build 3 "layers" that could be easily assembled and taken apart. The 2 bottom layer to contain batteries and the top panel to monitor battery charge, amplifiers and distribution of electricity to various consumers. The control panel should following functions:
- Ability to connect the batteries in/out individually, both to load and consumption
- Built-in charge controller
- Control of amplifiers and the cooling of these
- Power connection to different consumers as lights, bubbles, the connection to the musicians ect
- Charge of all brands of cell phones
- The batteries installed in the slots with Quick Disconnect, making them easy to replace with new ones for charge or power source
- Ect
Technical data for the power source:
7 x 230Ah 12V battery
4 X 125W Solar panels
Light
The goal for our lighting system was that it would use minimal power, yet provide bright light. It should have a wide variety of effects and should be integrated into the tent design.
We soon realized that we had to get the latest LED technology and to do that we had to order a lot of our LED's from Asia, because they had not arrived in Denmark. In total 72 LED's spread across the front of the arc. 60 ultra bright LEDs, 20 blue, 20 red and 20 green. 8 more powerful strobe LED's and last but not least 4 CREE R2 225 lumens LED's at the top of the arc. We would like a huge variation in the various shows. To do this the LED’s were connected individually to the control box. This allowed us to build a controller with many different shows, which could be combined in every way. The effects would be: on/off, music controlled, strobe light, floodlight and programmable intelligent lighting. The controller was built to run directly from 12v, so as to avoid unnecessary loss of power in any power supply.
Technical data of light:
72 Different LED
Power consumption "all on": 35-38W
Power "running show": 12-20W
Further, we each year have a program for collecting of trash for recycling, which you can read more about here
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