Glastonbury Festival is a celebration of performing arts, dating from the hippy era when you let your hair flow free. The five-day festival takes place annually on 1,500 acres of farmland without an electricity grid. This summer saw a battle of batteries versus generators in which renewables stemmed the tide.
Why Did Generators Share The Turf With Batteries?
Renewable energy is still evolving, as old habits with fossil fuel become increasingly less palatable. When Glastonbury began in 1970, there were no battery energy storage systems to speak of. You see, noisy smokey diesel generators ruled the roost for portable electricity back then.
A determined group of electricity supply specialists has been monitoring those noisy generators since 2014, to find a better way. Each year they assess their efficiency as they investigate more fuel and cost-efficient options at Glastonbury. We expect the ageing flower-power generation would approve!
The team monitored 126 generators this year, according to Powerful Thinking. The group comprised of engineering students, and research staff who roamed across the farmland to assess the efficiency of individual generators. Over five million bites of data enabled them to plot this in real time too.
The battle between batteries versus generators hotted up, as they confirmed that generators are most efficient at 40% to 80% load. However, their diesel consumption actually increases if their load drops below 30%. In fact, running a generator on 10% load could waste up to 60% of the fuel.
There Had To Be A Better Way To Do This
The researchers brought some hybrid battery sets on site. They installed them at points where they expected load would fall below generator-efficiency level. Then they wired these up to turn the generator off during low demand periods, so the batteries could kick in.
When this worked reliably they added solar panels to the mix to recharge the batteries with free energy. There were significant diesel savings, but we hope this is just a beginning. We long for days that the entire site powers off batteries and solar. It will be great to watch the stars at night too, without smelly diesels roaring in the background.
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Battery Generators Competing with Diesel
