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Pearce Hire Contribute to a Greener Cambridge Folk Festival
For the 21st consecutive year, Pearce Hire provided all the lighting and power at the 44th recent annual Cambridge Folk Festival. This year for the first time festival organisers and key suppliers worked with Julie's Bicycle to find ways to reduce the carbon impact of the festival.
The four-day festival featured live musical performances and entertainment to a sold-out audience of 10,000 people. Pearce Hire supplied all site power and lighting for bars, food stalls and tower lights for the car parks and campsites. A pair of synchronised generators powered the main stage and the broadcast compound.
An array of Pearce Hires moving and generic lighting all controlled with Avolites Pearl desks and ART 2000 dimmers help set the scene across three stages, reflecting the variety of acts performing.
Julie's Bicycle is a not for profit company who help events to reduce the UK music industry's greenhouse gas emissions.
Shaun Pearce, managing director of Pearce Hire worked closely with Ken Rankin, the festival production manager in advance as part of the carbon audit, to find ways of helping to minimise the carbon output. This included lighting fixtures being turned off at 6am until dusk whereas in previous years they have been left on, teaching the security staff to turn off the car park and camp site tower lights at first light so they were not running during daylight hours and reducing the number of lights on site through careful planning and positioning. Some ‘greener' alternatives were also introduced such as using low energy lamps instead of the traditional halogen throughout the site. New LED battery powered traffic lights were also used on the campsite and in the car park which completely eliminated a generator running for five days purely for the traffic lights!
Shaun Pearce spearheaded a team that consisted of site manager Andy White working with seven electricians and lighting director John Huson who managed four lighting technicians across the three stages.
Shaun said: "Our team had a fantastic combination of people who had worked at the festival many times before so knew it inside out and we were able to pass on this valuable knowledge to our new young employees Dan and Jake who impressed everyone with their hard work and enthusiasm. It was great to see the youth of today breaking into the industry, especially at an event which is investing so much in protecting the future. In total we reduced this years mains power usage by two thousand kilowatt hours from last year's and we are looking to increase this reduction next year by possibly using LED fitting lights for all the stages. We will be conducting a feasibility study in conjunction with the organisers to see if this will be possible."
In picture: Shaun Pearce with Cambridge Folk Festival performers Martha Wainwright and Eddie Barcan.
22nd August 2008
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