Secret Garden Party

The Secret to Saving Money

Secret Garden Party has been running since 2004, but in recent years has been increasing efforts to find alternatives to diesel generators for running this 30,000 capacity independent music and arts festival in Huntingdon.

They’re one of the big names signed up to Energy Revolution, the industry-wide collaboration to tackle climate change through the audience’s contributions to renewable energy, supported by Powerful Thinking. As well as this initiative to reduce festival emissions, they are mixing up the energy supply on site to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. In SGP’s recent 10th year, Firefly installed part of the festival’s power infrastructure, providing cleaner and greener alternative energy in the form of hybrid, solar and some biodiesel generators.

This consisted, specifically, of:

  • Cygnus Hybrid Power Generators (5 x 24kVA; 6 x 8kVA; 12 X 1.2kVA – with tower light)
  • 30 x 540W solar fold arrays to form a 16kWp solar system.

These solar arrays powered 12 of Firefly’s Cygnus Tower Lights and fed into a number of the Hybrid Power Generators, storing the power to be used after nighfall.

  • 8 Pyxis Power Packs, 12 Km of LED festoon lighting and over 100 LED floods
  • 15 Biodiesel Generators (3 x 165kVA; 2 x 100kVA; 2 x 60kVA and 8 x 20kVA)

The energy from the this kit provided power for the production village including the site office and event control, crew catering facilities and bar, all campsite power including campsite caterers and security, all campsite lighting, lighting across the whole site and a large proportion of the entertainment fields.

A total of 3,826 hours of diesel generator run time was saved by having hybrid systems – a total of around 50% of total run time. This use of hybrid technology reduced diesel dependency by 10,285 litres. On top of that, this new diverse system saved Secret Garden Party £7,713, and reduced overall carbon emissions for the festival by a staggering 24 tonnes.