All over Europe, festivals take the lead in finding innovative ways to use resources intelligently, employ renewable systems and reduce emissions. Yet at these festivals, diesel generators are still the most employed source to provide electricity due to a large amount of power needed. Using diesel to generate electricity has big disadvantages: substantial CO2 emissions, noise annoyance of droning generators, and bad smell. The latest developments in renewable energy, for instance vertical axis wind turbines, more efficient solar panels, improved batteries, now allow an efficient and economically attractive approach to produce large amounts of power from sustainable resources only.

ESNS is part of the Interreg NWE PowerVIBES project which has introduced the GEM (Green Energy Mill) Tower in January 2019. The GEM Tower aims to reduce festivals’ carbon footprint by 20% by making diesel generators superfluous. Instead, affordable and reliable energy will be produced from renewable resources wind, biomass, and solar power. To illustrate, if the Netherlands’ summer festivals cut their diesel consumption by 10%, over 1.000.000 liters of diesel and over 3,000 tonnes of CO2 can be saved annually.

The GEM Tower combines a vertical axis wind turbine, PV panels, and a battery, all customized in a containerized unit and with a bio-fuel generator as backup. All are connected in a smart grid. Two of such transportable GEM Towers (with smart grid) will be built and tested on 16 festival sites. This extensive testing regime is essential as of large differences among festivals, as they operate under significantly different legal, technical, seasonal, locational, and environmental conditions. This process of reflection and feedback (with a loop of testing-analysing-adjusting-implementing after each test) leads to a (practically) universally applicable system, to be used in all countries of the NWE region. The GEM Tower prototype was presented at ESNS 2019. At ESNS the first test results will be presented.